How to search for a pattern of a tar ball and pipe that name to tar to extract

linux_newb · 02-27-2012, 09:58 AM

Hi Guys,

I want to be able to extract a tarball without typing in the entire name of the archive. The name is something like foobarchive9.9.tgz. Is there anyway I can extract that tarball just using foobarch instead of spelling out the entire name? Any help or examples will greatly be appreciated.

Thanks

PTrenholme · 02-27-2012, 02:16 PM

I'm not sure what you're asking, but, if you're at a command prompt, then the <tab> key can usually be used to "complete" the command with a matching file name. So, for example, tar -xvf foob<tab> should be all you need to type. (If more than one file name matches the foob, the first <tab> will do nothing, and a second <tab> will list all matching file names.)

linux_newb · 02-27-2012, 04:28 PM

Hi Thanks for the reply. I guess i just need a way to extract a file without typing the whole name and just use some type of wildcard such as :

tar xzvf foobar**.tgz and it will extract the file based off of the matching characters. There has to be a way to do this but I just can't find anything.