If I have a tar.gz archive containing a single folder named like <somename>-<somenumber>, how do I extract it so it unpacks into a folder called <somename>?
For example, the file somearchive.tar.gz contains a top-level folder somearchive-0.1.2, and I tried something like:
tar xvfz somearchive.tar.gz --transform s/[a-zA-Z]+\-[0-9\.]+/somearchive/
but that extracts it to the default folder.
As steeldriver pointed out, tar --transform expects a sed replace expression, which uses basic regular expression syntax, not extended regular expression syntax, and in particular the “one or more” operator is \+, not +. See
Why does my regular expression work in X but not in Y?
tar xvfz somearchive.tar.gz --transform 's/^[a-zA-Z]\+-[0-9.]\+/somearchive/'
Or you could make it simply
tar xvfz somearchive.tar.gz --transform 's!^[^/]*!somearchive!'
Gilles's answer perfectly fit my question. However, I also found this alternative works as well:
mkdir somearchive
tar xvfz somearchive.tar.gz --strip 1 -C somearchive
--transformoption expects a GNU basic regular expression I think - so you need to backslash escape the+in order to make it a quantifier. Try--transform 's/[a-zA-Z]\+-[0-9.]\+/somearchive/'(-doesn't need escaping, and.doesn't when inside[])somename -> somename-somenumber. That way you can easily rollback if needed. If that is not an issue, see unix.stackexchange.com/a/535763/364705