CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gziptar
John Smith
John Smith

Reputation: 4353

Extract from tar.gz by file name

I've got a large amount of files inside .tar.gz.

Is it (programmatically) possible to extract a file by its filename, without the overhead of decompressing other files?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 812

Answers (1)

pmqs
pmqs

Reputation: 3705

I'll split the reply into two parts

Is it (programmatically) possible to extract a file by its filename

yes, it is possible to extract a file by its filename.

tar xzf tarfile.tar filename

without the overhead of decompressing other files?

In order to extract a file from a compressed tar file the tar program has to find the file you want. If that is the first file in the tarfile, then it only has to uncompress that. If the file isn't the first in the tarfile the tar program needs to scan through the tarfile until it finds the file you want. To do that is MUST uncompress the preceding files in the tarfile. That doesn't mean it has to extract them to disk or buffer these files in memory. It will stream the uncompression so that them memory overhead isn't significant.

Upvotes: 2

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