How do I unzip a tar gz archive to a specific destination?

Question

I want to unpack a .tar.gz file to a specific directory.

The archive file is in /root/Documents. I want to unzip it into /root/Desktop/folder. The folder structure in zipped file should be preserved in the destination directory.

Patches · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-08T23:58:32.287

232

You have two choices:

cd /root/Desktop/folder
tar xf /root/Documents/file.tar.gz

or

tar xf file.tar.gz -C /root/Desktop/folder

edited Oct 08 '16 at 23:58

answered Oct 19 '11 at 08:43

Patches

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thanks, how about `gzip -dc archive.tar.gz | tar -xf - -C /destination` ? – alwbtc Oct 19 '11 at 13:12
what `-C` stands for? – AlikElzin-kilaka Jan 28 '15 at 15:56
4

@AlikElzin-kilaka From `man tar` -C, --directory DIR change to directory DIR – tachomi Jan 28 '15 at 16:31
2

`tar -xvjf foo.tar.bz2` for those who are looking for *bz2* like me – vladkras Jan 26 '16 at 07:09
You actually don't have to specify the compression format anymore with modern tar. I edited the answer so it will work with bz2, xz, and whatever else you want to throw at it. – Patches Oct 08 '16 at 23:59
Both of these seem to require manually creating a directory first though :/ (Not that it's hard, it's just an annoying extra command I don't wanna have to do). oh well – Zoe Sep 13 '21 at 21:45
@Zoe `tar -xf foobar-1.2.tgz -C /opt --one-top-level=foobar` https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/478341/5164 – Patches Sep 14 '21 at 01:24

How do I unzip a tar gz archive to a specific destination?

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