Q:

How can I extract only some specific folders from a tar.gz archive?

Let's say I have the archive website.tar.gz, inside is the following folder structure :
home  
  -mike 
    -www
      -coolwebsite
        file1
        file2
        file3
        etc.

When I extract the achive, it recreates exactly the same folder hierarchy (of course). I was hoping there was a way to extract for example only the "coolwebsite" folder to whichever folder I'm in at the moment.
So if I'm on my server in mydir/ and I extract website.tar.gz, I want the result to be the coolwebsite folder, without all the preceding folders. Is that possible ?

A:

Just try this:

tar xvf tarfile --strip=4 ./home/mike/www/coolwebsite/*

should remove to 4 levels of directories (including ".")
EDIT: add option z (i.e. tar xzvf ...) if the input file is gzip'ed

