Do you ever need to extract strange packages to your Linux system? Occasionally, vendors will package scripts or binaries as a tarball and kindly omit a Makefile or other scripts to handle installation. While running an experiment with OSS a few months ago, I saw myself trying to figure out how this worked. So the next time you run into a binary package that is distributed this way, try this to make short work of it:
tar xzf file.tar.gz -C /target/dir --strip-components=1
