How do I extract with tar to a different directory?

Question

This doesn't work:

tar xf /tmp/foo.tar.gz foo/bar
tar: foo/bar: Not found in archive

It's not obvious to me what would do this beyond extracting it in place and moving the files over.

Answer 1

From man tar:

     -C directory
         In c and r mode, this changes the directory before adding the
         following files.  In x mode, change directories after opening the
         archive but before extracting entries from the archive.

i.e, tar xC /foo/bar -f /tmp/foo.tar.gz should do the job. (on FreeBSD, but GNU tar is basically the same in this respect, see "Changing the Working Directory" in its manual)

Answer 2

if you want to extract an tar archive elsewhere just cd to the destination directory and untar it there:

 mkdir -p foo/bar
 cd foo/bar
 tar xzvf /tmp/foo.tar.gz

The command you've used would search the file foo/bar in the archive and extract it.

Answer 3

Doing:

(cd foo/bar ; tar xf /tmp/foo.tar.gz )

would do the job.

Basically, what is does is spawning a new shell (the parentheses), in this subshell, change directory to foo/bar and then untar the file.

You can change the ; by a && to be sure the cd works fine.