how do i use tar to extract a specific directory including all its containing files and subdirectories?

tar xpf filename.tar /path/to/directory/to/extract

i already tried that but for some reason it hangs when it reaches the last subdirectory.

this will extract the directory and all its sub directories to the working directory but when it gets to the last subdirectory the cursor just blinks. i would expect to see also the files being extracted with the verbose option set but i don't see any files being extracted, i just see the directories.

Tar will appear to hang after the last file is extracted while it cleans up after itself (releases the file, clears the memory etc.). On my systems this can take anywhere from a couple of seconds to several minutes depending on the speed of the system and the size of the tarball.

I do normally see filenames with only one v option set. You might try adding an extra v or two to increase the level of detail it sends to stdout.

its been hanging for a while now. about 15 minutes. the size of the folder is about 16GB, so its size may be a reason why its still hanging. i have a feeling something is not right though. why does it hang after the last subfolder? this seems very odd although i'm not sure how tar is supposed to behave.

does it first extract directory structures and then start over again to extract the files??? if it does, it is hanging right before its starts on the files because after the last subfolder it just hangs. i've tried this with a smaller directory (just a few folders and files) and it works fine.

if i extract with the option --files-from it still also hangs after the last subfolder. any ideas, i'm completely lost.

some progress (i think). i think this may be a permissions problem. i can't seem to change the ownership on the tar file even as root.

the `ls` command shows the owner and group as numbers. why???? could it be because this file is a CIFS share ??? how do i change permissions on this???

-rwxr--r-- 1 35026 35005 176080142271 2007-09-18 15:14 affull.091807.tgz

Sorry for the delay in my reply.

Tar should be extracing the files in each directory before moving on to extract another directory. For a multi-GB tar file, the hang time at the end will likely be substantial. I once had an 80GB tarball that took several hours to close out after extracting the files I needed. The machine doing the extraction was a bit slow though, so I let it run overnight.

The permissions are showing up as numbers because they are owned by a UID and GID that your system has not yet allocated. Is there a way you could get another copy of the tarball? There shouldn't be any problem with your changing the permissions as root.

typo on previous post. the size of the tarball is actually 160GB, not 16GB. This is a tarball of a FULL backup. I know it should take some considerable amount of time to extract, i just don't know how long is TOO long. i have for the moment given up on this tarball and extracted my differential backup instead which was a lot smaller and had the files we needed. as for UID and GID, i don't know much about this, (file permissions in linux weren't always my strong suit), so i guess its time to do some research. thanks for you help!