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### 2.8 How to Extract Members from an Archive

Creating an archive is only half the job—there is no point in storing files in an archive if you can’t retrieve them. The act of retrieving members from an archive so they can be used and manipulated as unarchived files again is called extraction. To extract files from an archive, use the `--extract` (`--get` or `-x`) operation. As with `--create`, specify the name of the archive with `--file` (`-f`) option. Extracting an archive does not modify the archive in any way; you can extract it multiple times if you want or need to.

Using `--extract`, you can extract an entire archive, or specific files. The files can be directories containing other files, or not. As with `--create` (`-c`) and `--list` (`-t`), you may use the short or the long form of the operation without affecting the performance.