Target directory structure for tar different than original directory structure

Is there any way to set a different target directory structure than the orignial directory structure the tar archive was created from without creating it by hand?

For example, I have many files in a directory structure like this:

~/yyyy/mm/dd/hh/mm/*.*

Organized by when the file was received. I already create a tar archive without preserving the directory structure above for a whole day's worth of files (I have a small script that loops thru every minute of every hour and appends to a single tar archive). I would like to specify to tar to extract the archive to directory structure like this:

~/yyyymmdd

Seems simple enough as I could create the yyyymmdd directory by hand and just extract my archive into it, but I give this tar archive to a different system (which I have no control over) that relies on this tar archive being extracted to a yyyymmdd directory and the yyyy/mm/dd/hh/mm/*.* directory structure gives me performance gains because its organized. Also, I cannot change the original directory structure or waste system resources creating the desired target directory structure before creating the tar archive.

Is there a simple way extract a tar archive under a directory it was never in in the first place?

Asked by user36744 (125 )
Oct 14, 2014 at 20:28