What is tar --strip-components & zip --junk-paths with examples in Linux

How to use tar --strip-components and zip --junk-paths to remove absolute path from the archive.Tar is an archiving utility which needs no introduction to Linux users. In this article I will help you understand more about

• tar --strip-components
• zip --junk-paths

Both these options perform the same task i.e. stripping the relative path while extracting the archive.

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Method 1: Use tar –strip-components to strip absolute path

Create tar archive

First let us create an archive. In this example I have created a nested directory structure under /tmp which we can check using tree command

# tree /tmp/dir1/
/tmp/dir1/
└── dir2
    └── dir3
        ├── file1
        ├── file2
        ├── file3
        ├── file4
        └── file5

2 directories, 5 files

I will create tar archive using GZIP compression and store it inside /root as myarchive.gz

# tar -czvf /root/myarchive.gz  /tmp/dir1/dir2/dir3

Snippet from my terminal

create tar archive with gzip compression

Extract archive without tar –strip-components

By default tar stores the absolute path of file. I will extract this archive content under /extract

# tar -xzvf /root/myarchive.gz -C /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

Extract without tar –strip-components

The archive extracts and stores the absolute path which may not be required in most cases

# tree /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

tree output

Extract archive with tar –strip-components

• In this example, we will strip the absolute path while performing the tar extract
• Provide a numerical value with --strip-components, this number represents the number pf paths you want to strip while performing the extract
• In this example there are 4 directories which we want to strip from the output so we will use --strip-components=4
• Here -C DIR means change to DIR before performing any operations

# tar -xzvf /root/myarchive.gz --strip-components=4 -C /extract

Snippet from my terminal

Extract with tar –strip-components

Verify the content. Now we don’t have absolute path after extracting the archive.

# ls -l /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

List content

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Method 2: Use zip –junk-paths to remove absolute path

We can perform similar operation with zip command in Linux and Unix

Create zip archive without –junk-paths

First let me create a zip archive using BZIP2 compression myarchive.bz2 under /root

# zip -Z bzip2 /root/myarchive.bz2 /tmp/dir1/dir2/dir3/*

Snippet from my terminal

Create BZIP2 archive without –junk-paths

By default, the archive here also store the absolute path of the file

Extract zip archive

We will extract this archive using unzip and store it inside /extract folder

# unzip /root/myarchive.bz2 -d /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

extract bzip2 archive

As expected, we have absolute path of the files under /extract

# tree /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

tree output

Create zip archive using –junk-paths

Now we will remove the absolute path of the file and just store the relative path by using zip with --junk-paths
Since we are creating zip archive with bzip2 compression, we have used -Z bzip2

# zip -Z bzip2 --junk-paths /root/myarchive.bz2 /tmp/dir1/dir2/dir3/*

Snippet from my terminal

create bzip2 archive with –junk-paths

From the output we can see that the absolute path is not stored any more with zip --junk-paths

Extract zip archive

We will extract this archive using unzip and keep the files under /extract

# unzip /root/myarchive.bz2 -d /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

extract archive

So we have no absolute path anymore for the files under our archive

# ls -l /extract/

Snippet from my terminal

list content

So you can use either zip with --junk-paths or tar with --strip-components to remove absolute path

Lastly I hope the steps from the article to understand tar --strip-components and zip --junk-paths on Linux and Unix was helpful. So, let me know your suggestions and feedback using the comment section.

References:
man page for tar
man page for zip