How to extract specific file from partially downloaded tar?

Question

I have a large tar file but it could not be downloaded completely as the browser crashed when verifying the download. Is it possible to extract some files from this tar?

I am able to view the files using tar -tf abc.tar and this shows the directories and folders

a/
a/b/
a/b/1
a/b/2

However if I use tar -zxvf abc.tar a/b/1 it gives

tar: Error opening archive: Failed to open abc.tar

Is there any way to only extract the available files in the tar in such a case?

Answer 1

The archive isn’t compressed, so you need to drop the -z flag:

tar -xvf abc.tar a/b/1

However

Failed to open abc.tar

suggests that the tarball itself is no longer there.