How do I untar a subdirectory into the current directory? [closed]

Solution 1:

Why don't you untar normally, then just:

mv wordpress/.* .
mv wordpress/* .
rmdir wordpress

But alas, there's:

tar --strip-components=1 -zxvf wordpress.tgz

Solution 2:

Surprisingly, my tar (GNU tar v1.16) doesn't have an option to strip initial pathname elements.

However, it seems that more recent versions sport a --strip-components=number parameter, which will strip that many compononents from the start of the path.

If like me you are using an older tar, and you are certain that the archive does not contain a directory or file named wordpress/wordpress, you could always just make a symlink from wordpress to ., then extract as usual:

ln -s . wordpress
tar xvfz latest.tar.gz wordpress
rm wordpress