Extract compressed tarball to folder?

This is for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.7 (Tikanga).

Wanna extract entire contents of a tar.gz to a folder of my choosing. Thanks

The tarball has to have relative paths - ie.,

./somefile or ./somedir/somefile

Be sure you have relative paths:

tar xft tar.gz | head

extract:

cd somedir
tar zxf tar.gz 

@Jim
I suppose you meant

tar zft tar.gz | head