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I downloaded a tarball(abc.tar.gz) which has a root folder(abc) and multiple subfolders(a, b, c, etc). And I have a folder called Target in machine(macbook pro), with multiple subfolders(a, b, c, etc) either.
Now I want to unarchive the tarball to Target folder and auto merge the subfolders. How can I achieve it? I've tried to unarchive it in Target but result with a subfolder(abc) in Target:

cp abc.tar.gz ~/Target
cd ~/Target
tar xzvf abc.tar.gz

Result:

Target/abc/a
Target/abc/b
Target/a
Target/b

What I want is:

Target/a    # auto merged
Target/b    # auto merged

Thanks in advance!

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1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately, tar will always unpack the full archived path even when you only request a single resource inside a subfolder path. e.g.:

$ tar -x abc/a -zvf abc.tar.gz

will unpack only subfolder a but it's parent directory abc will still be created.

From the Target directory you can do

$ for d in `ls abc`; do cp -rf abc/$d/* ./$d/; done

to copy the archive folders into pre-existing, same-name folders in the current folder Target

or simply

$ cp -rf abc/* ./

to create all archive folders in ~/Target. If a folder named, say, 'foo' exists in both abc and Target then the contents of abc/foo will be copied to Target/foo. Be aware, however, that at the file level abc/foo/bar.txt will overwrite Target/foo/bar.txt without notice or warning.

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  • mv ./abc/a ./a will not work in mac, it just move the folder ./abc/a into ./a as a subfolder. Instead I use cp -rf abc/a/* ./a/(or just cp -rf abc/* ./). but I feel it is little bit cumbersome.. Anyway, thanks for your suggestion. :D
    – Kjuly
    Dec 26, 2011 at 10:22
  • i updated my answer to reflect this as a one-line loop. BTW which shell are you using? perhaps mv ./abc/a ./ (destination is simply the current directory) should work?
    – venzen
    Dec 26, 2011 at 10:50
  • Thanks @verzen, my shell is bash. And I tried mv ./abc/a ./ with error:mv: rename ./abc/a to ./a: Directory not empty. cp -rf abc/* ./ works well. Maybe you can add this cl to your answer and I'll accept it if there's no better answer. :p
    – Kjuly
    Dec 26, 2011 at 11:03
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    answer updated. This behavior of bash in MacOSX is interesting... I see in this post that a shopt -s dotglob nullglob might be needed for bash in OSX to behave as expected...
    – venzen
    Dec 26, 2011 at 11:26

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