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If I’ve got a .tar archive, and when I extract it, it gives me a single folder foo containing some more stuff, like this:

foo/
  something.txt
  another.txt
  bar/
    something-else.txt

Is there a way I can modify the .tar command to “skip” the root folder (foo in this case) and just extract all the contents of that folder directly into my cwd like this:

something.txt
another.txt
bar/
  something-else.txt
Giacomo1968
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callum
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1 Answers1

121

Easy. Just use --strip-components=1 on the archive like this:

tar -xf archive.tar --strip-components=1

And as explained in the official tar man page:

--strip-components=NUMBER

strip NUMBER leading components from file names on extraction

With the logic being that if a path consists of foo/something.txt then the first “component” of that path would be foo/ so --strip-components=1 would effectively drop the foo/ from the path foo/something.txt.

Giacomo1968
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    I'd advise only using this for tar files that you know the structure of. Note that --strip-components will not just strip leading directories, if you had a tar file that didn't have a directory as its top level entry (e.g., if the contents of the tar file were [file1.txt, somedirectory/] this command would not extract file1.txt. I haven't found a method that only strips a top level directory without causing problems with other kinds of tar files that just have plain files as their top level entry. – jrh Apr 28 '20 at 15:33
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    Wouldn't have thought tar would work with zip files, but it did. – C1pher Jun 30 '22 at 18:15