If you ever untar a tarball that doesn't contain a directory of files, instead a bunch of files, and you want them all in one directory, this will remove the files extracted from that tarball that were extracted.

undotar

#!/bin/sh
#
# Removes the files that were extracted locally from a tar file.  This
# can be used when a tarball doesn't contain a directory of files and
# extracts a bunch of files into the pwd.
#
# Example:
#
#  % undotar file.tar
#  % undotar file.tar.gz
#  % undotar file.jar
#  % undotar file.zip
#  % undotar file.bzip2
#

function remove_files_from_tar {
    file=$1
    shift
    case $file in
	*.tar.gz)
	    cmd="tar tvfz"
	    ;;
	*.tar)
	    cmd="tar tvf"
	    ;;
	*.jar)
	    cmd="jar tvf"
	    ;;
	*.zip)
	    cmd="unzip -t"
	    ;;
	*.bzip2)
	    cmd="bunzip2 -t"
	    ;;
	*)
	    echo "Don't know how to handle $f"
	    return
	    ;;
    esac
    all=`$cmd $f | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs`
    for f in $all; do
	rm -rf $f
    done
}

for f in "$@"; do
    remove_files_from_tar $f
done