I know how to extract single file from a tarball, although now I have 500 GB tar file without any compression, just a plain tar and I would like to extract specifically 3 directories, with such structure:
dir1/subDir1/
dir2/subDir2/
dir3/subDir3/subSubDir3/
There are many subdirectories inside each of those and real many files. I wish to simply extract everything inside of those.
I am curious as to how to do this, without having to extract the whole tarball.
You can use the --strip-components=n option.
tar -xvf archive.tar --strip-components=4
--strip-components=NUMBERstrip NUMBER leading components from file names on extraction
tar extracts directories like files, see the man page for more info.
# -v; verbose parameter is rather obstructive
# in case of thousands and thousands of files
tar -xf archive.tar directory/
tar -xvzf keys/ssl/nginx/ssl-0.0.0-development.tgz -C keys/ssl/nginx package/ dit extract a directory named package within keys/ssl/nginx. That does not work, the root of the tar is still extracted with this synthax