How do I untar a tar.gz file to multiple directories?
 

Hey everyone,

I am trying to find a way to untar a file.tar.gz in my home/noob directory into 15 different directories.

where the tar.gz file is located: /home/noob
where the 15 directories are located: /home/noob/Staging/ 1-15 folders

Without having to extract the tarball individually, is there a simple way in one or two commands that can take the tarball and extract it to all 15 folders ?

Please and thanks!

I'm not sure I follow what your are trying to do and why. You could try something like this:
This will copy file1, the one you extracted from the tarball, to dir1, dir2, and dir3. xargs will call cp 3 times to do this, see the man page for xargs for details.
jdk

Thank you.

I was trying to use find, xargs, and tar ... I am going to try it your way.

I am just trying to automate some random tasks to be honest. I'm just trying to learn how to use different common commands and how to implement them together.

That's great. Let us know how you make out. Be sure to post your solution to help others with a similar problem.
jdk

This will scam all directories in /home/noob/Staging/ and will untar the tar/gz file /home/noob/file.tar.gz into the top level of each directory in /home/noob/Staging/.

PS: The echo in red will give you a preview of of what the code will do without doing anything. Look at the output carefully and see if things look right.

If it looks OK, run the code again without the echo part.

FYI - initramfs's post can also be simplified by replacing the find, print, while, read with a simple for loop and an if to check for directories:

That's what's cool with linux, there will always be more ways to do a task :)

This is true. And usually it goes from complex, to simple.. such as this. Say we have a file called textfile and we want to display it from bottom to top, or as I would say, backwards. In bash we might start with this:

Then we might use awk to make that smaller:

Then we might use sed, to make it smaller:

And eventually a unix-beard would jump in and say:

Because nearly everything that can be done to a file or string, has already been done and compiled into a program.

I totally agree. The simpler and the least code, the better :)

No feedback from the OP, oh well... :/

Thanks for the feedback, everyone
 

Hey everyone.

Sorry for the late reply. At the time when I posted this, I was actually preparing for a job interview (yay!) that I actually got hired from, so the past 8 months has been a lot of hit-the-ground-running type of scenarios. I wanted to say thank you for all the help and contributions. I wish I still had the virtual machine I was using at the time so I could post the script and show it to you all, but it definitely used a lot of the methods you all mentioned on this post.

Thanks again!

on a desktop install of any major OS
r-click the tarbal and select "extract here" from the menu

terminal
tar -x tarbal.tar.gz


or the ( tarbal.tgz )

An old solution (and a bit tacky, but I was impatient at the time):
This is tacky in that it spawns a new process to handle each directory. It also does all of them in parallel. There are also several ways to the tar command itself. I think the one I originally used was
The nice thing about the "wait" command was that without options or parameters, it waits for all subrocesses to finish before returning.

The other thing to note - don't do this for LOTS of diretories as it can tie up a server with large tarfiles. (I made that mistake from a client of a NFS server, and tied it up for about 15 minutes. Long enough for people to start running around to find out what was hanging...)