I have been trying to uncompress several .tar.gz and .tgz tarballs from a single directory (example /tarballs) into another directory (example /usr/share/untarballs) with one command:

tar xvzf /tarballs/* /usr/share/untarballs

But have had no luck.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks

Well there is two reasons why that command won't work. The first is because you can't specify a directory to extract to like that. If you run it like you have then it will try to extract the /usr/share/untarballs file from the archive which is obviously not there. Just add the C switch to allow you to extract to a certain directory.
Ex:

tar xvzCf /usr/share/untarballs /tarballs/file.tar.gz

The second problem is however with the wildcard. The string /tarballs/* is not passed to the tar command. But instead the shell first interprets the wildcard and then passes it on to the tar command. So in your case the command which gets run would be something like:

tar xvzf /tarballs/1.tar.gz /tarballs/2.tar.gz /usr/share/untarballs

In the case of the above command it will try to extract the files 2.tar.gz and untarballs from the archive 1.tar.gz which will fail. So you've got to repeatedly run the tar command passing it only one tar file ech time. You could use a for loop for that but you said you where looking for one command line. So maybe something like this would work for you:

ls /tarballs/*.tar.gz | xargs -n 1 tar xvzCf /usr/share/untarballs

The ls command command will make a list of all the tar.gz files. This is then passed on to xargs who will run the tar command passing it 1 parameter each time (-n 1). I know it's 2 commands with a pipe but I don't think you can get it shorter then that.

Mik I think I will hook up a T1 line to your house. Thanks, yet again.