untar in another dir
 

hi,

small question,
but handy if i know how it works
(i cant find it anywhere)

i am trying to untar a tar file into another dirrectory

like this:

> tar -xzvf test.tar > dir/

i tried everything but nothing works
and get only the error
-bash: dir: Is a directory


if this is not possible
can i than copy the content of a whole dir into another dir?

please advise me with the command...

thanks
Tim

tar xjf test.tar.bz2 -C /path/to/dir

Look at the Man page for tar, it gives you the correct syntax
I think it should be
tar -xzvf /home/yourname/filename /anotherdir/etc/filename

You'll need to have permission to write to that dir of course.

well...

this looks more like zipping the file
instead of UNzipping it...

i tried the command but its not working

i think i should be starting something like:

> tar -zxvf test.tar ...................

but the last part should be it whats missing

Ps. if this is not possible does anyone know
a way to copy the whole contents of a dir.
into another dir....?

Tim

This worked for me, but I had to use the full pathname. Using tar -zxf test.tar.gz -C projects didn't work. In my home directory:

$ vi test.txt
$ tar -zcf test.tar.gz test.txt
$ tar -zxf test.tar.gz -C /home/mhearne/projects
$ ls projects
test.txt

Michael

yes this works.

but the thing is that i have more than one file
so i zipped the whole dir. with 10 files in them.
Now these files i wanna unpack in different dirs.

but that is not possible... cos unpacking means
putting the dir theire. but in fact i only want the
content of that dir unpacked in another dir..

Still got it? :-)

Hi Timmy01,
Doing the same thing with a whole dir also works for me:

$ tar -zcf projects.tar.gz projects
$ tar -zxf projects.tar.gz -C /home/mhearne/tmp
$ls tmp
projects/

But, if you want to move it to an area that you don't own, then you may have to be root or have sudo privileges.

Michael