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#### 2.8.4 Extracting Archives from Untrusted Sources

Extracting files from archives can overwrite files that already exist. If you receive an archive from an untrusted source, you should make a new directory and extract into that directory, so that you don’t have to worry about the extraction overwriting one of your existing files. For example, if `untrusted.tar` came from somewhere else on the Internet, and you don’t necessarily trust its contents, you can extract it as follows:

    $ mkdir newdir
    $ cd newdir
    $ tar -xvf ../untrusted.tar

It is also a good practice to examine contents of the archive before extracting it, using `--list` (`-t`) option, possibly combined with `--verbose` (`-v`).