I received a tar file of a directory with 50,000 files in it. Is it possible to extract the files in the tar file without first creating the directory?

ie. Doing tar -xvf filename.tar extracts as follows:
x directory/file1.txt
x directory/file2.txt
.
.
.

I would like to avoid the creation of "directory", otherwise I have to move the files when the process is complete.

Thanks.

tar- is used to create a single file out of a collection of directories and files.So,you will always get the same contents(as the original one when the tar was created) when you untar it .Because the whole directory structure and the contents are recorded as a stream of bytes in your tar file.So, I think there is no other go!!!

One way is via pax. I created directory called tartest and populated it with a few files. The I did:
tar cvf tartest.tar tartest

This results in a tar archive with files in a directory called tartest. I can restore this with pax via:

pax -r -dv -f tartest.tar

But if I want to restore the files directly into my current directory, I can do:

pax -r -f tartest.tar -s'/tartest\///'

Before you try something like that, do this... "pax -dv -f tartest.tar" is like "tar tvf tartest.tar". It just lists the contents of the tar archive. Now do:

pax -dv -f tartest.tar -s'/tartest\///p'

and look at the results. This way you can be sure that you have the -s argument right before you try the restore.

This is working correctly Perderabo. But what if I have a directory which inturn have sub-diectories in it. And i want all the files in the parent directory as well as the files in different child directories to be extracted into one single directory without the sub directories being created.

Awesome Perderabo.

Thanks so much for the reply.