I would like to extract specific files from a large tar.gz tarball file. How Do I extract files from a tarball file under CentOS 7/6.5 or RHEL 7/6.5 linux system? How to extract a single file from a tar.gz file on your linux system?
You need to use tar tool to extract a single or specific files from a tar.gz file. Below you will see that how to extract a single file named “test1” from a tarball file named “test.tar.gz”.
CentOS /RHEL Extract specific File Using Tar Command
You firstly need to check the tarball file content which file you want to extract or if that file is included in archive file. type the following command:
tar ztf test.tar.gz tar ztf test.tar.gz | grep test1
outputs:
[root@devops temp]# tar ztf test.tar.gz dir1/ dir2/ dir3/ test1 test2 test3 test4 [root@devops temp]# tar ztf test.tar.gz | grep test1 test1
To extract A single file from a archive file, issue the following command:
tar -zxvf <tar filename> <file you want to extract> tar -zxvf test.tar.gz test1
or
tar --extract --file=test.tar.gz test1
outputs:
[root@devops temp]# ls test.tar.gz [root@devops temp]# tar -zxvf test.tar.gz test1 test1 [root@devops temp]# ls test1 test.tar.gz
To extract specific files from a archive file, you can also use wildcard to extract files that matching specific pattern. For example extract all files that matching “test*” in the test.tar.gz archive file. You just need pass the “–wildcards” option to tar command, issue the following command:
tar -zxvf test.tar.gz --wildcards 'test*'
Outputs:
[root@devops temp]# ls test1 test.tar.gz [root@devops temp]# tar -zxvf test.tar.gz --wildcards 'test*' test1 test2 test3 test4 [root@devops temp]# ls test1 test2 test3 test4 test.tar.gz
See also: tar manual page