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

1 Answer

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.

1

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