How to extract files to another directory using 'tar' command?

To extract an archive to a directory different from the current, use the -C, or --directory, tar option, as in

tar -xf archive.tar -C /target/directory

Note that the target directory has to exist before running that command (it can be created by mkdir /target/directory).

Read the manual page (command: man tar) for other options.

Note that if your tarball already contains a directory name you want to change, add the --strip-components=1 option:

tar xf archive.tar -C /target/directory --strip-components=1

Combining the previous answers and comments:

To simply extract the contents and create target directory if it is missing:

mkdir -p /target/directory && tar xf archive.tar -C /target/directory

To extract and also remove the root(first level) directory in the zip

mkdir -p /target/directory && tar xf archive.tar -C /target/directory --strip-components=1

Another option is to use --one-top-level. This will automatically create a directory based on the filename of the original.

tar zxvf filename.tgz --one-top-level

Additionally if you want, you can specify your own and tar will create it automatically.

tar zxvf filename.tgz --one-top-level=new_directory

What I found interesting in relation to extraction is, that it depends how you created the archive, see this example

cd /tmp
mkdir folder
touch folder/file.txt

when you do tar -zcvf folder.tar.gz folder everything is as expected = when you untar it now it will be untarred (folder will be create, if you removed it) as /tmp/folder/.

But, when you will create tar as tar -zcvf tmp-folder.tar.gz /tmp/folder and you untar it in /tmp folder, the result will be /tmp/tmp/folder directory ! In such case you have to untar it to / - tar -xf tmp-folder.tar.gz -C /