That means this particular tar ball contains a directory called "81334567-COMPLETE", and the file you want to extract is inside that directory. You need to pass "81334567-COMPLETE/toc" as first arg in the "extract_file" call.

To do that in a programmatic way -- without having to hard-code the directory name for each tar file -- you could try something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Archive::Tar;

my $wdir = "U:/EMM loads";

# load an array of tar file names:

open( DIR, $wdir ) or die "$wdir: $!";
my @tarballs = grep /\.tar$/, readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;

# for each tar file, yank out the "toc" file:

for my $tarball ( @tarballs ) {
    my $tar = Archive::Tar->new( "$wdir/$tarball" );
    my ($toc) = grep { $_->name =~ m{/toc$} } $tar->get_files;

  # make up a local name for this toc file, based on the tarball name:

    ( my $tocname = $tarball ) =~ s/tar$/toc/;

  # write the toc file data to the local toc file:

    open( TOC, ">", $tocname ) or die "$tocname: $!";
    print TOC $toc->get_content;
    close TOC;
}
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Thank you for the examples, I am going give this a whirl today when i get into work!

Actually, on second thought -- depending on the number of data files in your tar files, it might be quicker if you replace this line:

    my ($toc) = grep { $_->name =~ m{/toc$} } $tar->get_files;
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with this short-circuit loop:

    my $toc = undef;
    for my $file ( $tar->get_files ) {
        if ( $file->name =~ /toc$/ ) {
            $toc = $file;
            last;
        }
    }
    ( defined $toc ) or do { warn "no toc file in $wdir/$tarball\n"; n
+ext };
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That assumes that the first time you see "toc" as the file name, this is the actual "toc" file that you want. (It also checks for the case where a tarball lacks a "toc" file.)

Here is the example that I could find from my tar program for extracting:

sub untar{
    my $tar=Archive::Tar->new;
    @_ = glob ('*');
    foreach my $otar(@_){
        next unless($otar =~ /(\.tar)$/i);
        $tar->read($otar,1);
        my @contents = $tar->get_files();
        foreach(@contents){
            $tar->extract($_->{name});
            print "$tar-error\n";
            sleep 60;
            if($tar->error !~ //){
                print "$_->{name} extracted\n";
            }else{
                print "Error extracting $_->{name} from $otar\n";
            }
        }
        undef $tar;
        }
    }
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