Extract Without First Directory

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Extract Without First Directory

Jan 6th, 2009

Whenever I download something that is compressed on the Internet in a .zip, .rar or .tar.gz it is always a crapshot whether or not it contains a “container directory”. A “container directory” is a directory that contains all the other files usually with the same name as the compressed file.

For example the Zend Framework when downloaded contains a folder called, ’ZendFramework-1.7.2’. All the other files are contained under this folder. This is great but sometimes I want to extract the contents of the folder without the “container folder”.

This is how I used to extract the contents and remove the “container folder”:

tar -xvf ZendFramework-1.7.2.tar.gz

Get rid of the tarball…

rm ZendFramework-1.7.2.tar.gz

cd ZendFramework-1.7.2/

Which would result in:

Zend Framework Directory Structure

Copy everything in the “container” folder and move it up a directory.

cp -rf * ../

Now I have found a better way…
A better way

The flag that I have learned is the strip flag. This will strip off the first directory and extract the rest.

tar -xvf ZendFramework-1.7.2.tar.gz --strip 1

The only thing now is… How do I tell if a tar contains a “container folder”?

Easy

tar -tf ZendFramework-1.7.2.tar.gz | head

This will list contents of the file ’ZendFramework-1.7.2.tar.gz’ showing only the first few lines.

What do you think? Is there an even better way?

Posted by Mark Sanborn Jan 6th, 2009 linux