7.19.3 Examples

How to extract an entire tar archive to the current working directory:

import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz")
tar.extractall()
tar.close()

How to create an uncompressed tar archive from a list of filenames:

import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar", "w")
for name in ["foo", "bar", "quux"]:
    tar.add(name)
tar.close()

How to read a gzip compressed tar archive and display some member information:

import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz", "r:gz")
for tarinfo in tar:
    print tarinfo.name, "is", tarinfo.size, "bytes in size and is",
    if tarinfo.isreg():
        print "a regular file."
    elif tarinfo.isdir():
        print "a directory."
    else:
        print "something else."
tar.close()

How to create a tar archive with faked information:

import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz", "w:gz")
for name in namelist:
    tarinfo = tar.gettarinfo(name, "fakeproj-1.0/" + name)
    tarinfo.uid = 123
    tarinfo.gid = 456
    tarinfo.uname = "johndoe"
    tarinfo.gname = "fake"
    tar.addfile(tarinfo, file(name))
tar.close()

The only way to extract an uncompressed tar stream from sys.stdin:

import sys
import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open(mode="r|", fileobj=sys.stdin)
for tarinfo in tar:
    tar.extract(tarinfo)
tar.close()

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