(un)tar a certain directory from an archive
 

Hey guys,
I have a huge backup archive which contains 4 different folders. Now I only need one of the folders.
The tar file is to big to be extracted as a whole. It would take too long so how can I only extract a certain directory from a tar file?

I tried

tar xf file.tar --exlude 'directory/*' --exclude directory *

but that did not work!

THX

Suinatsa

more generally

Thanks that's what I needed!