Extract contents of folder in tar file

Question

I am trying to extract a tar file in python, and was wondering if I could extract the contents of a folder in a tar file. For example:

tar_files.tar.gz

• tar_files
  • test.txt
  • test2.txt
  • mydir
    • test3.txt
  • mydir2
    • test4.txt

I want to extract it to mydirectory , like so:

• mydirectory
  • test.txt
  • test2.txt
  • mydir
    • test3.txt
  • mydir2
    • test4.txt

How should I approach this problem?

Answer 1

Here's a quick-and-dirty way to do this:

import os
import sys

#Name of tarfile (without the .tar.gz extension)
file_name = "tarfile"

#Target directory
target_dir = "mydirectory"


#Extract the tar file
os.system("tar -xf " + file_name + ".tar.gz")

#Move the tar files into your target folder
os.system("mv " + file_name + " " + target_dir)

Although the os.system calls may not be very best practice, it gets the job done quick.

Alternatively you could look into the tarfile module: https://docs.python.org/2/library/tarfile.html