You need to use **`--no-anchored`** like this:

```bash
$ tar -xf ../mein.tar --wildcards --no-anchored "dir1/*.jpg"
```

According to the [man page][1]:

> ### File name matching options
>
> <pre><code>--anchored
> Patterns match file name start.
> 
> --no-anchored
> Patterns match after any / (default for exclusion).
> 
> --wildcards
> Use wildcards (default for exclusion).
> 
> --no-wildcards
> Verbatim string matching.
> </code></pre>


See also [untar only a certain number of files from a large tarball][2]


[1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tar.1.html
[2]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/42198/128893

I have a tar file with the following contents:

```bash
$ tar tvf ../mein.tar 
drwxr-xr-x user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:31 ./
drwxr-xr-x user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir2/
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir2/file21.jpg
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:29 ./file1.jpg
drwxr-xr-x user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/
drwxr-xr-x user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/dir11/
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/dir11/file111.jpg
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/dir11/file112.jpg
drwxr-xr-x user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/dir21/
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/dir21/file122.jpg
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/dir21/file121.jpg
-rw-r--r-- user/user         0 2019-01-14 15:30 ./dir1/file11.jpg
```

It contains several sub-directories which may or may not contain jpg files. The file names are not always the same, but I know that there is exactly one jpg file in directory 'dir1'. I want to extract this file only, none of the other jpg files, neither in dir2 nor in dir1/dir*.



What I have tried so far is

```bash
$ tar -x -f ../mein.tar --wildcards 'dir1/*.jpg'
tar: dir1/*.jpg: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
```

or

```bash
$ tar -x -f ../mein.tar --wildcards --wildcards-match-slash 'dir1/*.jpg'
tar: dir1/*.jpg: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
```

If I use:

```bash
$ tar -x -f ../mein.tar --wildcards  "*.jpg"
```

Then I get all jpg files, this is not what I want.

Does anyone have a clue how to extract the jpg file in dir1 given that I don't know the exact name of that file? What I expect is to get exactly one file in sub-directory dir1, the output should be 'dir1/file11.jpg'.

