Redirecting tar output

[Mike Coleman]

Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> writes:
> If I have a tarball that wants to put it's output in foo.1-2.3.4.6/, 
> and I would rather have the output in foo/, is there a way to do that 
> other than extracting then moving the files?

AFAIK, there's no tar option to strip directories (like patch's -p option).

You could probably do something like

        $ mkdir foo
        $ ln -s foo foo.1-2.3.4.6
        $ tar xf foo.tar .

but it's not really a general solution.  (I haven't tested it, either.)

Mike