How to extract all tar.gz files present in multiple folders at a time to another directory?

Question

There are many folders in my current directory. Each folder has a tar.gz file. To extract the tar.gz file I need to be inside each folder and run the following command every time.

tar xvzf tar.gz -C /path/to/targetdirectory

Inside my current directory it looks like below:

   current directory
            ├──Folder1
                ├── A.tar.gz
            ├──Folder2
                ├── B.tar.gz
            ├──Folder3
                ├── C.tar.gz
            ├──Folder4
                ├── D.tar.gz
            ├──Folder5
                ├── E.tar.gz

To extract all at a time I tried like this

tar xvzf */*.tar.gz -C /path/to/targetdirectory

This gave me an error:

tar: Folder1/A.tar.gz: Not found in archive
tar: Folder2/B.tar.gz: Not found in archive
tar: Folder3/C.tar.gz: Not found in archive
tar: Folder4/D.tar.gz: Not found in archive
tar: Folder5/E.tar.gz: Not found in archive

Solution

Use find and execute a command on each found file, in the directory of that file:

find . -name '*.tar.gz' -execdir tar -xzvf '{}' \;

The -execdir option executes tar from within the folder of the found file, and {} will be replaced by the tarfile's name.

See the find documentation for more info.

Comments

[beginner]

Where should I give target directory in the command?

[beginner]

Ok. Gave like this to get the extracted files into target directory. find . -name '*.tar.gz' -execdir tar -C /path/to/targetdirectory -xzvf '{}' \; This worked

[slhck]

Yep, you can specify the commands as usual within the -exec option.

[beginner]

hi...I have small doubt. Is there a way to give path to those...*.tar.gz files?

[slhck]

You can find in another directory by replacing find . with find /path/to/directory.

[metabuddy]

Here is the complete cmd using different search directory and different target directory: find /var/www/staging/ -name '*.tar.gz' -execdir tar -C /var/www/target -xzf ' {}' \; Thanks slhck and beginner for help, this works very well.