Extract file from tar home/

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 18:15 -0400, Bob Goodwin wrote:
> Yes, and this is essentially what I did except I tar'd the entire
>     /home/bobg/ directory into one big lump. My question was could I
> go in and unzip individual files. It seems that can't be done easily.

You don't seem to have grokked the previous answers (mine and others)
including the one you're replying to. What you want to do is easy and
completely standard. The quoted answer tells you exactly how to do it.
Once more with feeling:

To extract the whole thing:
$ tar xf bobg.tar.gz
(or tar xvf to if you want to watch it working)

To extract only a specific file:
$ tar xf bobg.tar.gz the/file/you/want

poc