I want to extract a .tgz file and extract any subdirectories that have files that are .tgz and .tar

Question

I'm using the code below to extract .tgz files. The type of log files (.tgz) that I need to extract have sub-directories that have other .tgz files and .tar files inside them. I want to extract those too.

Ultimately, I'm trying to search for certain strings in all .log files and .txt files that may appear in a .tgz file.

Below is the code that I'm using to extract the .tgz file. I've been trying to work out how to extract the sub-files (.tgz and .tar). So far, I've been unsuccessful.

import os, sys, tarfile

try:
    tar = tarfile.open(sys.argv[1] + '.tgz', 'r:gz')
    for item in tar:
        tar.extract(item)
    print 'Done.'
except:
    name = os.path.basename(sys.argv[0])
    print name[:name.rfind('.')], '<filename>'

Answer 1

This should give you the desired result:

import os, sys, tarfile

def extract(tar_url, extract_path='.'):
    print tar_url
    tar = tarfile.open(tar_url, 'r')
    for item in tar:
        tar.extract(item, extract_path)
        if item.name.find(".tgz") != -1 or item.name.find(".tar") != -1:
            extract(item.name, "./" + item.name[:item.name.rfind('/')])
try:

    extract(sys.argv[1] + '.tgz')
    print 'Done.'
except:
    name = os.path.basename(sys.argv[0])
    print name[:name.rfind('.')], '<filename>'

As @cularis said this is called recursion.