[FIXED] Conditional extraction of files from an Archive file

Issue

I have a large tar.gz archive file having nxml files and total size is around 5gb. My aim is to extract files from it but, I do not have to extract all of them. I have to extract all those files whose name is greater than a threshold value.

For example: Let us consider 1000 is our threshold value. So
path/to/file/900.nxml will not be extracted but
path/to/file/1100.nxml will be extracted.

So my requirement is to make a conditional extraction of files from the archive.
Thanks

Solution

1. Use tar -tf <archive> to get a list of files in the archive.
2. Process the list of files to determine those you need to extract. Write the file list to a temporary file <filelist>, one line per file.
   • Looking at the tags you chose, you can use either Python or bash for this string filtering, whichever you prefer.
3. Use tar -xf <archive> -T <filelist> to extract the files you need.
   The option -T or --files-from reads the filenames to process from the given file.
   • See also the manpage for tar.

Answered By - Roland Weber