To strip down a new version of gdb for import, extract the files like this: tar -xvzf gdb-4.18.tar.gz -X FREEBSD-Xlist tar -xvzf gdb-4.18.tar.gz gdb-4.18/gdb/config/i386 tar -xvzf gdb-4.18.tar.gz gdb-4.18/gdb/config/alpha tar -xvzf gdb-4.18.tar.gz gdb-4.18/gdb/config/mips