How do I extract a tar file using python 2.4?

This example is from the tarfile docs.

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

First, a TarFile object is created using tarfile.open(), then all files are extracted using extractall() and finally the object is closed.

If you want to extract to a different directory, use extractall's path parameter:

tar.extractall(path='/home/connor/')

Edit: I see now that you are using an old Python version which doesn't have the TarFile.extractall() method. The documentation for older versions of tarfile confirms this. You can instead do something like this:

for member in tar.getmembers():    print "Extracting %s" % member.name    tar.extract(member, path='/home/connor/')

If your tar file has directories in it, this probably fails (I haven't tested it). For a more complete solution, see the Python 2.7 implementation of extractall

Edit 2: For a simple solution using your old Python version, call the tar command using subprocess.call

import subprocesstarfile = '/path/to/myfile.tar'path = '/home/connor'retcode = subprocess.call(['tar', '-xvf', tarfile, '-C', path])if retcode == 0:    print "Extracted successfully"else:    raise IOError('tar exited with code %d' % retcode)

Here's the more general code from torchvision library:

import osimport hashlibimport gzipimport tarfileimport zipfiledef _is_tarxz(filename):    return filename.endswith(".tar.xz")def _is_tar(filename):    return filename.endswith(".tar")def _is_targz(filename):    return filename.endswith(".tar.gz")def _is_tgz(filename):    return filename.endswith(".tgz")def _is_gzip(filename):    return filename.endswith(".gz") and not filename.endswith(".tar.gz")def _is_zip(filename):    return filename.endswith(".zip")def extract_archive(from_path, to_path=None, remove_finished=False):    if to_path is None:        to_path = os.path.dirname(from_path)    if _is_tar(from_path):        with tarfile.open(from_path, 'r') as tar:            tar.extractall(path=to_path)    elif _is_targz(from_path) or _is_tgz(from_path):        with tarfile.open(from_path, 'r:gz') as tar:            tar.extractall(path=to_path)    elif _is_tarxz(from_path):        with tarfile.open(from_path, 'r:xz') as tar:            tar.extractall(path=to_path)    elif _is_gzip(from_path):        to_path = os.path.join(to_path, os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(from_path))[0])        with open(to_path, "wb") as out_f, gzip.GzipFile(from_path) as zip_f:            out_f.write(zip_f.read())    elif _is_zip(from_path):        with zipfile.ZipFile(from_path, 'r') as z:            z.extractall(to_path)    else:        raise ValueError("Extraction of {} not supported".format(from_path))    if remove_finished:        os.remove(from_path)