tar

Extract into a specific directory

Use tar’s --directory=DIR option to change to DIR before extracting the archive.

Excerpt from man tar

-C, --directory=DIR
    Change to DIR before performing any operations. This option is
    order-sensitive, i.e. it affects all options that follow.

$ mkdir -pv ~/Public/extracted
$ tar -C ~/Public/extracted -xvf ~/Backups/to_extract.tar

-C does not create the target directory. It must already exist, otherwise it fails with an error, which is why the example above includes mkdir -pv to create the target directory first.

Even though -C/--directory says “change to DIR before performing any operations”, the source archive to be extracted doesn’t need to be given as an absolute path. A relative path to refer to it will work as well.

$ cd ~/Backups
$ tar -C ~/Public/extracted -xvf ./Backups/to_extract.tar

Pack Excluding Directories

Useful command to create an archive of a React/Vue.js where we want avoid including node_modules and dist directories:

$ tar \
    --exclude './myapp-poc1/node_modules' \
    --exclude './myapp-poc1/dist' \
    -cf myapp-poc1.tar \
    ./myapp-poc1

$ du -h myapp-poc1.tar
800K    myapp-poc1.tar