Extract specific folders from a tar archive

Backups or Archives are usually very large and it can take forever to extract all of the files to retrieve a specific folder. Additionally, the drive may be close to it’s maximum capacity and extracting the full archive may not be an option. Here’s how to extract a specific folder from a tar archive:

tar -xvf backup.tar $foldername

or if the folder is within another folder:

tar -xvf backup.tar $folderpath/$foldername

Note – there is NO starting slash in front of folderpath