Extract a single file from single tar ball

Extracting Specific Files

Extract a file called etc/default/sysstat from config.tar.gz tarball

#tar -ztvf config.tar.gz
#tar -zxvf config.tar.gz etc/default/sysstat
#tar -xvf {tarball.tar} {path/to/file}

This is also valid

#tar --extract --file={tarball.tar} {file}

Extract a directory called css from cbz.tar
##tar --extract --file=cbz.tar css

Wildcard based extracting

You can also extract those files that match a specific globbing pattern (wildcards). For example, to extract from cbz.tar all files that begin with pic, no matter their directory prefix, you could type:

#tar -xf cbz.tar --wildcards --no-anchored 'pic*'

To extract all php files, enter

#tar -xf cbz.tar --wildcards --no-anchored '*.php'

Where,

-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.


Tar listing

Tar command provides the option to list files inside compressed tar ball. However mtools includes command called lz which gunzips and shows a listing of a gzip’d tar’d archive without extracting files.

For example, display listing of file called backup.tar.gz type command:

#lz backup.tar.gz

As you see lz provides a listing of a gzip’d tar’d archive, that is a tar archive compressed with the gzip command. It is not strictly necessary on Debian GNU/Linux (or other Linux/BSD/Solaris oses), because the GNU tar(1) program provides the same capability with the command:

#tar -tzf backup.tar.gz