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. If we are in the directory of the archive to be extracted, 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