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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I want to extract all .htaccess files from a tarball, how can I do so? I see only one mention of "include" in the manual page of tar which is not related with an option for including only certain filenames at all.

Is there an alternative other than mentioning all paths as argument?

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5 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

GNU tar supports "--wildcards" option.

tar tvfz file.tar.gz --wildcards '*/.htaccess'
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Wow, I haven't even considered using wildcards for tar. Thanks! – Lekensteyn Feb 22 '12 at 17:12
up vote 4 down vote

Not a single command, but this works:

$ tar -ztvf tarball.tar.gz | grep .htaccess | awk '{print $9}'>files
$ cat files
1/.htaccess
2/.htaccess
$ tar -zxvT files -f tarball.tar.gz 
x 1/.htaccess
x 2/.htaccess
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your solution is far more portable than mine. – andcoz Feb 22 '12 at 18:03
This can be simplified to tar tzf tarball.tar.gz | grep .htaccess > files. Before andcoz' answer, I've succesfully used tar xf tarball.tar.gz -T <(tar tf tarball.gz | grep -F .htaccess). I still like andcoz' answer more because it's shorter to type – Lekensteyn Feb 22 '12 at 18:08
Also, don't forget to rm files when done, or you may be quite confused in a month or two.. ;) – Izkata Feb 22 '12 at 21:03
up vote 3 down vote 
tar tf tarball.tar.gz | grep '/\.htaccess$' | tar xfT tarball.tar.gz -
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Smart use of the word for standard input (-) – Lekensteyn Feb 22 '12 at 22:16
up vote 0 down vote

Using pax, the POSIX standard archive utility:

pax -r -s ':/\.htaccess:/.htaccess:' -s ':^\.htaccess:.htaccess:' -s ':.::'

(i.e. extract non-root .htaccess files and root .htaccess files as is; suppress all other files)

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up vote 0 down vote

Just expanding on andcoz's accepted answer to point out the differences between gnutar and bsdtar ...

# tar (GNU tar) 1.26
# bsdtar 2.8.4 - libarchive 2.8.4
# tested in Bash shell on Mac OS X

# only list .htaccess files from archive
bsdtar -T <(echo '*/.htaccess') -tvzf archive.tar.gz
bsdtar --include='*/.htaccess' -tvzf archive.tar.gz
gnutar --wildcards '*/.htaccess' -tvzf archive.tar.gz

# only extract .htaccess files from archive
bsdtar -T <(echo '*/.htaccess') -xvzf archive.tar.gz
bsdtar --include='*/.htaccess' -xvzf archive.tar.gz
gnutar --wildcards '*/.htaccess' -xvzf archive.tar.gz
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