Extracting from a tar archive

Last revision July 20, 2004

To extract or restore files from the tar archive, use the x operation. You should first change your working directory to the new directory where you want to put the files. However, if you specified absolute pathnames when making the archive (for example, tar cf /dev/rmt1h /home/sysop/username), then tar must restore the files to the same pathname and doesn't care what your current directory is.

After the x operation flag, you can give an optional list of files or directory trees to extract. The names in the list must exactly match the names as stored in the archive. For example, if you archived the current directory which contained the file example, it is recorded in the archive with the name ./example, and you must specify the name in that form to recover it. If you give no list of files to recover, all files in the archive are extracted.

Just like when you created archives, use the f option with extraction to specify the location of a tar archive on disk or on the non-standard tape drive, for example:

tar xf /tmp/myfiles.tar

If you specify the v option, tar will list the names of the files as it extracts them, for example:

tar xvf /tmp/myfiles.tar

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