I have a gzipped tar archive in /tmp/test/ $ tar ztvf file.tgz | head -1 dr-xr-xr-x root/sys 0 2004-04-19 15:15:15 ./ I'm not running as root. I run an extract: $ tar zxvf file.tgz ./ somedir/ tar: somedir: Cannot mkdir: Permission denied somedir/somedir/ tar: somedir/somedir: Cannot mkdir: No such file or directory The permissions on /tmp/test/ are being changed by the tar file, meaning I can't extract the files. Any way around this using tar (without changing users etc)?