Can you untar selectively?

[mark at mark.mielke.cc]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 01:04:28PM +1000, stefaan wrote:
> How would I go about untarring a particular file selectively out of a
> tarball.
> Is this possible at all if I know the path/filename existing in the tarball?
> Also been looking at cpio, would this maybe do it?

    tar -xvf blah.tar my/file/name.c

Also useful might be the listing of the file names in a tar file:

    tar -tf blah.tar

cpio can do it, but I'm not sure that it does a better job.

Cheers,
mark

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