How to Extract Specific Files from .tar.gz files #

It recently came to my attention that a lot of software on Github is being distributed through their releases interface, specifically in .tar.gz archive files. This is a perfectly fine format, but tar has a reputation for being a rather obtuse program to remember.

As a result, I found myself wondering: Can I download a tar.gz file, pipe it into tar and only extract the one file I want, thus installing the uv binary by simply dropping it into /usr/local/bin. And the answer is yes! Apparently I can! It just took some looking through documentation and searching through Stack Overflow.

Here's the basic example:

1wget -c https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/releases/download/0.5.5/uv-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz -O - | tar -zxv --strip-components 1 -C /usr/local/bin uv-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/uv;

So what's going on here?

• wget is a pretty well known command, I won't spend much time on it.
  • The important part is -O - which tells wget to write the output to the pipe (which is what the - represents).
• tar however, is the main focus of today's presentation.
  • -z: filter archive through gzip, use to decompress .gz files.
  • -x: instructs tar to extract files.
  • -v: Verbose (show progress while extracting files).
  • --strip-components 1: instructs tar to strip away one "layer" of directories from inside the archive. How do we know that the archive has directories inside, what what are they? We can use this command: tar -ztf <ARCHIVE> to list the contents of the archive (<ARCHIVE> can be omitted if its being piped in). If we execute the command on the uv archive, we would see that the file we care about is: uv-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/uv so one directory will need to be stripped away.
  • -C /usr/local/bin: tells us to move to the /usr/local/bin directory before extracting, which is how we specify where the file should be extracted.
  • uv-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/uv: The file being extracted from the archive.

The end result of this is that /usr/local/bin/uv will be present on your system (and usable).

References:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14295771/how-do-i-extract-files-without-folder-structure-using-tar - describes how --strip-components works.
• https://www.tecmint.com/download-and-extract-tar-files-with-one-command/ - describes how to pipe stuff from wget into tar.
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/61461/how-to-extract-specific-files-from-tar-gz - describes how to specify a file to extract from tar.