I know that I can run

$ tar xf somefile.tar.gz -C somedir

to extract the tar.gz file to somedir, but it requires somedir exists first.

Is there a way to extract to a directory and create the directory on the fly if it does not exist?

1

1 Answer

Using the GNU tar command, you can do this:

tar -xf somefile.tar.gz --one-top-level=somedir

From man 1 tar:

 --one-top-level[=DIR] Extract all files into DIR, or, if used without argument, into a subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard compression suffixes recognizable by --auto-compress).

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