File with square brackets in name not extracted by tar

Question

On Linux I'm extracting files from a tar archive using

tar -xC / -f /tarFile.tar someFolder/[HD] video1.mp4

This works always fine but not in this case where file name contains square brackets. Tar response is

someFolder/[HD] video1.mp4: not found in archive

The file is extracted fine if I remove the square brackets.

I already tried both escaping all characters with \ and surrounding file name with '. No luck.

Any hint? Thanks

Answer 1

The first command you have provided will attempt to extract two or three files:

someFolder/H
someFolder/D
video1.mp4

If you enclose filename in single quotes (') the tar program will see the [HD] and process it as a glob wildcard meaning "Either H or D". It will therefore attempt to extract two files:

someFolder/H video1.mp4
someFolder/D video1.mp4

Quoting the filename and using the --no-wildcards flag will suppress these attempted expansions:

tar -xC / -f /tarFile.tar 'someFolder/[HD] video1.mp4' --no-wildcards

Answer 2

Replace square brackets with the wildcard characters (such as ? or *), e.g.

tar -x -C/ -v -f tarFile.tar 'someFolder/?HD? video1.mp4'

or:

tar -x -C. -v -f tarFile.tar 'someFolder/*video1.mp4'

To confirm the filename, you can list the archive file by:

tar -t -f tarFile.tar | grep mp4$