How can I extract only *.c files from a tar.gz?

[KIA]aze · 06-05-2007, 06:56 AM

{BBI}Nexus{BBI} · 06-05-2007, 07:39 AM

Use an archive manager like ark.

pwc101 · 06-05-2007, 08:22 AM

This worked for me:

Code:

 tar xvfz archive.tar.gz "*.c"

The quotes are important so that the shell doesn't parse the wildcard, but instead passes it to tar.

[KIA]aze · 06-05-2007, 03:11 PM

Ah, of course, the quotes...should have thought of that. Thanks.

I tried with --wildcards but that didn't work and for the exclude option, I would have needed the opposite regular expression and I don't know how to do that (is it even possible?).

forrestt · 06-05-2007, 03:37 PM

Just to be redundant, you can also just escape the * with a \

Code:

tar -zxvf archive.tar.gz \*.c

[KIA]aze · 06-05-2007, 10:58 PM

The "--wildcards" still seems to be necessary, otherwise I get this:

Quote:

tar: Pattern matching characters used in file names. Please,
tar: use --wildcards to enable pattern matching, or --no-wildcards to
tar: suppress this warning.
tar: *.c: Not found in archive
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

So it's:

Quote:

tar -zxvf archive.tar.gz --wildcards "*.c"

pwc101 · 06-06-2007, 04:02 AM

Hmmm... that's odd. I tried it on an archive with at least one directory in it (to check it wasn't getting everything from the first directory level only) without the --wildcards option and it extracted the files I specified with no trouble. Perhaps it's a version issue?... I'm using tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25.

theYinYeti · 06-06-2007, 04:39 AM

Or if you're using bash, this should work too:

Code:

tar -xvzf archive.tar.gz -T <(tar -tzf archive.tar.gz | grep '\.c$')

Yves.