relative pathname question!

[Mark F. Proudman]

In article <1988Aug10.165751.20311 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> >As far as I can tell, there is NO way to extract tar files with
> >absolute pathnames anywhere except their original positions.
> 
> It has long seemed to me that tar x very badly needs a renaming facility,
> to cope with this and other problems.

I'm joining this discussion late, so maybe someone has already come up
with this, but how about a "chroot newdir tar", prior to running tar?
I don't know how this works on other systems, but it worked on a
tower. Of course, I had to copy tar and mkdir to a bin  directory
relative to the new root.  Of course, cpio -c is far superior...