Copy a file from nested tar.gz file

Question

I have a situation where I want to extract a file from nested tar.gz. The structure of .tar.gz is as

• test.tar.gz
  • data1
    • data2
      • data3
        • test2.tar.gz
          • data4
            • data5
              • test.log

I want to extract only test.log file from the test.tar.gz file. I have seen this post with which we can extract file of tar.gz but not in nested levels.

I am adding output of tar tfz data1.tar.gz The folder structure might be a bit different as entered the above structure manually.

data1/.
data1/META.json
data1/TEMP
data1/TEMP/temp-2
data1/TEMP/temp-2/1-chksum.txt
data1/TEMP/temp-2/1
data1/TEMP/temp-2/1/otherfiles
data1/TEMP/temp-2/1/otherfiles/2016_06_24.tar.gz

So the test.log file is present within a nested folder inside 2016_06_24.tar.gz

Answer 1

Assuming that data4 & etc are members of the compressed test2.tar.gz archive, and using GNU tar's --strip-components option:

tar xzOf ./test.tar.gz data1/data2/data3/test2.tar.gz | \
  tar xzf - --strip-components=2 data4/data5/test.log

... which tells the first tar to extract the nested compressed tar file to stdout, then tells the second tar to take that inputted file and extract only the data4/data5/test.log file, stripping the first two components out. That will drop the test.log file in your current directory. If you do not have GNU tar, simply remove the --strip-components option, and the file will be extracted with the path that it was archived with.