tar command dont tar to original directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

HI,

if I have a tarfile called pmapdata.tar that contains

tar -tvf pmapdata.tar

-rw-r--r--   0/0       21 Oct 15 11:00 2009 /var/tmp/pmapdata/pmap4628.txt
-rw-r--r--   0/0       21 Oct 14 20:00 2009 /var/tmp/pmapdata/pmap23752.txt
-rw-r--r--   0/0     1625 Oct 13 20:00 2009 /var/tmp/pmapdata/pmap13710.txt
-rw-r--r--   0/0       21 Oct 13 01:00 2009 /var/tmp/pmapdata/pmap12247.txt
-rw-r--r--   0/0    19754 Oct 16 09:00 2009 /var/tmp/pmapdata/pmap3293.txt

when I extract it is there anyway i can choose the directory so that the files are not placed in /var/tmp/pmapdata?

2

GNU tar will ingnore leading slashes (by default even). pax can do it too. Perhaps you have pax installed on your system?