How to change name of a folder inside tar.gz before decompressing?

Question

I have a tar.gz called "first.tar.gz". Inside it I have only one folder called "first" (no other folders or files). I want to decompress the tar.gz, so the folder "first" renames to "second".

I tried this:

tar -zxf first.tar.gz --transform s/first/second/

but it didn't work for me. I didn't get any errors / response, it just extracted the "first" folder without renaming. The version of tar is 1.26

Answer 1

When you use --transform with GNU tar and ask for verbose output with -v, the pathnames you see outputted are the un-transformed pathnames.

GNU tar will transform the pathnames according to your --transform expression but will not report these in the output unless you use the option --show-transformed-names.

Example:

$ tree
.
`-- archive.tar

0 directories, 1 file

$ gtar -t -f archive.tar
first/
first/dir/
first/dir/first.txt
first/dir/file

$ gtar -xv -f archive.tar --transform='s/first/second/'
first/
first/dir/
first/dir/first.txt
first/dir/file

Note how the above command reports the pathnames stored in the archive. Below, we see that the pathnames were transformed appropriately.

$ tree
.
|-- archive.tar
`-- second
    `-- dir
        |-- file
        `-- first.txt

2 directories, 3 files