How do you extract a JAR in a UNIX filesystem with a single command and specify its target directory using the JAR command

Question

I am creating a Python script within which I am executing UNIX system commands  I have a war archive named Binaries war which is within an ear archive named Portal ear  The Portal ear file resides in  say  home foo bar   jar xf  home foo bar Portal ear Binaries war   Will extract the Binaries war file out of the  home foo bar Portal ear archive into the current directory I am running the script from   How do you specify a target directory to be extracted to using just one command   I would like to do something like this to extract Binaries war into the directory  home foo bar baz   jar xf  home foo bar Portal ear Binaries war  into target directory  home foo bar baz    I searched the the JAR man page for options and can t seem to find a simple way to do this  Of course I can extract the archive into my current directory and then move it using mv but I d like to do this in one shot and not shuffle directories and files around

User · Answer

I don t think the jar tool supports this natively  but you can just unzip a JAR file with  unzip  and specify the output directory with that with the  -d  option  so something like     unzip -d  home foo bar baz  home foo bar Portal ear Binaries war

User · Answer

If this is a personal script  rather than one you re planning on distributing  it might be simpler to write a shell function for this   function warextract   jar xf  1  2  amp  amp  mv  2  3     which you could then call from python like so   warextract  home foo bar Portal ear Binaries war  home foo bar baz    If you really feel like it  you could use sed to parse out the filename from the path  so that you d be able to call it with  warextract  home foo bar Portal ear  home foo bar baz Binaries war   I ll leave that as an excercise to the reader  though   Of course  since this will extract the  war out into the current directory first  and then move it  it has the possibility of overwriting something with the same name where you are   Changing directory  extracting it  and cd-ing back is a bit cleaner  but I find myself using little one-line shell functions like this all the time when I want to reduce code clutter

User · Answer

Can t you just change working directory within the python script using os chdir target   I agree  I can t see any way of doing it from the jar command itself   If you don t want to permanently change directory  then store the current directory  using os getcwd   in a variable and change back afterwards

User · Answer

If your jar file already has an absolute pathname as shown  it is particularly easy   cd  where you want it  jar xf  path to jarfile jar   That is  you have the shell executed by Python change directory for you and then run the extraction   If your jar file does not already have an absolute pathname  then you have to convert the relative name to absolute  by prefixing it with the path of the current directory  so that jar can find it after the change of directory   The only issues left to worry about are things like blanks in the path names

[java] How do you extract a JAR in a UNIX filesystem with a single command and specify its target directory using the JAR command?

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