Xceed .NET Libraries Documentation
Extracting items from a tar archive

Welcome to Xceed .NET, .NET Standard and Xamarin Libraries! > Basic Concepts > Tar and GZip capabilities > Xceed Tar > Extracting items from a tar archive

This topic demonstrates how to extract files and folders from a GZipped Tar archive to a destination folder. With Xceed’s FileSystem-based products, a folder is a folder: it does not matter if it is located within a Tar archive, on disk or in memory.

Tar and FileSystem-based GZip are not currently available in Xceed's .NET Compact Framework products.

Basic steps

To extract items from a Tar archive, the following steps must be performed:

  • Retrieve a reference to an AbstractFile-derived class representing the actual Tar archive file; in this example, DiskFile will be used. If the Tar archive is GZipped, retrieve a reference to a GZippedFile class and pass the DiskFile object you have just retrieved to its constructor. 

  • Retrieve a reference to a new or existing Tar archive using the TarArchive class, using either the GZippedFile object you have just retrieved for a GZipped Tar archive or a DiskFile object for a non-GZipped Tar archive. 

  • Retrieve a reference to a folder where the files will be extracted to using an AbstractFolder-derived class such as DiskFolder, ZipArchive, MemoryFolder or IsolatedFolder. 

  • Call the CopyFilesTo method to copy the entire contents of the Tar archive to the destination folder.

When performing many operations on an archive, you may wish to consider optimizing your code by using batch updates.

Demonstration

This example demonstrates how to extract items from a Tar archive to a folder located on disk.

VB.NET Copy Code

Imports Xceed.Tar
Imports Xceed.GZip
Imports Xceed.FileSystem

Dim tar As New TarArchive( New GZippedFile( NewDiskFile( "c:\test.tar.gz" ), _
                                            "test.tar" ) )

Dim folder As New DiskFolder( "c:\temp" )

tar.CopyFilesTo( folder, True, True )

C# Copy Code

using Xceed.Tar;
using Xceed.GZip;
using Xceed.FileSystem;

TarArchive tar = new TarArchive( new GZippedFile( new DiskFile( "c:\\test.tar.gz" ),
                                                  "test.tar" ) );

DiskFolder folder = new DiskFolder( "c:\\temp" );

tar.CopyFilesTo( folder, true, true ); 

This example demonstrates how to extract items from a non-GZipped Tar archive to a folder located on disk.

VB.NET Copy Code

Imports Xceed.Tar
Imports Xceed.FileSystem

Dim tar As New TarArchive( New DiskFile( "c:\test.tar" ) )
Dim folder As New DiskFolder( "c:\temp" )

tar.CopyFilesTo( folder, True, True )

C# Copy Code

using Xceed.Tar;
using Xceed.FileSystem;

TarArchive tar = new TarArchive( new DiskFile( "c:\\test.tar" ) );
DiskFolder folder = new DiskFolder( "c:\\temp" );

tar.CopyFilesTo( folder, true, true );

Things you should consider

The main questions you should ask yourself when extracting items from a Tar archive are:

  • Do you want to filter (specify specific files and folders) the items that are to be extracted? Use filters. 

  • Do you want to display the status of the operation? See the Events topic. 

  • Do you only want to copy a specific file or folder? Use the CopyTo method. 

  • Do you want to move items rather than copy them? Use the MoveTo and MoveFilesTo methods.

 

 

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