simple tar question can not find answer in man file

davimint · 05-21-2007, 10:44 PM

Is there anyway to remove or strip the leading directory when extracting a tar file. I didn't see a option or understand it anyway in the man page.

Here's an example of what I would like to do so my question doesn't get confused.

I want to install the "essential-20061022.tar.bz2" for Mplayer in the directory of "/usr/local/lib/codecs/ so
I run the following command

Code:

tar xvjf essential-20061022.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/lib/codes

Which of course all I did was direct the output of the tar command so I end up extracting the file to /usr/local/lib/codes/essential/

But what I want to do is install the files and strip the leading directory "essential".

Maybe I did not confuse everyone.

Quakeboy02 · 05-21-2007, 10:53 PM

Here's a Rube Goldberg method. It might work. But, really if it's just one file what's the fuss?

Code:

ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/essential
tar xvjf essential-20061022.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/lib
rm /usr/local/lib/essential

davimint · 05-21-2007, 11:21 PM

Quakeboy02,
Well, that didn't work. It's the whole dll libary for MPlayer so it's about 20 files and one README. Which it's not a problem to simply mv *.dll the files but I just thought there would be a way to strip the leading directory name inside the tar file so I could direct the files to the proper directory without having to move them. Just trying to learn a trick if there was one.

davimint

Quakeboy02 · 05-22-2007, 01:03 AM

Hmm, I thought it might. What exactly didn't it do?

A second way, which I would probably use myself unless I was short on disk space and it was an extremely large tar file, would be to create a junk directory, untar to that. Go into the "essential" directory, and create a new tar file from there.

There are usually better ways to do things than what I come up with, but I'm a brute force kinda guy. I prefer to bang it with successively larger sticks till it works!