Sometimes I find myself on a unix based system for the first time in awhile and I have to use the tar program to extract data from a tar or tar.gz compressed data set.

Here is a nifty set of helpful tips:

You can also extract files that match a specific pattern. This example shows how to extract files that start with psoft from the tar file psoft.tar regardless of its directory location:

$ tar -xf psoft.tar --wildcards --no-anchored 'psoft*'

To extract all xml files:

$ tar -xf psoft.tar --wildcards --no-anchored '*.xml'

Command Flags:

• -x: instructs tar to extract files.
• -f: specifies filename / tarball name.
• -v: Verbose (show progress while extracting files).
• -j : filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress .bz2 files.
• -z: filter archive through gzip, use to decompress .gz files.
• –wildcards: instructs tar to treat command line arguments as globbing patterns.
• –no-anchored: informs it that the patterns apply to member names after any / delimiter.

This post was sourced from article: Tar Extract a Single File(s) From a Large Tarball from CyberCiti