Extract only the contents of an archived directory from within an archive

Question

The Situation

I am extracting a CMS from drupal-7.15.tar.gz to /var/www.

When extracted normally (with 'tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz') the files end up in /var/www/drupal-7.15/

The Goal

I want the contents from the archived drupal-7.15/ directory to extract directly into /var/www

Answer 1

Use

 tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz --strip-components=1

--strip-components=1 tells tar to strip the first path component (the drupal-7.15/ in your case) from each file when unpacking.

Answer 2

The simplest and more user-friendly solution is to open nautilus using:

gksudo nautilus

Then head to your archive, double click it, wiat for it to open with the archive manager, double click into the directory (inside the archive manager, hit Ctrl+A so as to select all the files inside the directory, click on the "Extract" button, and then select /var/www/

Alternatively, you can just

sudo mv /var/www/drupal-7.15/* /var/www/
sudo rm -r /var/www/drupal-7.15