How to untar an archive from one directory to another in linux?

I want to untar a package from one directory to another directory, directly from the command prompt. I want to untar the joomla package into the htdocs directory of xampp. How to do that directly from command prompt ? The reason i am asking this is if I try the "drag and drop" way, it won't be possible as xampp is stored in /opt directory and without super-user authentication nothing can be saved into it. You can argue saying that why did I untar xampp initially in su mode ,but that had to be done so that apache doesnt give me any start-up problems.

Solution 1:

unpack tar.gz:

tar zxvf tarball.tar.gz -C destination_dir

unpack tar.bz2:

tar jxvf tarball.tar.bz2 -C destination_dir

Solution 2:

cd targetdir
tar xf pathtoarchive/archive.tar