I am running a PHP script that gets me the absolute paths of files I want to tar up. This is the syntax I have:
tar -cf tarname.tar -C /www/path/path/file1.txt /www/path/path2/path3/file2.xls
when I untar it create the absolute path to the files. I do I get just /path with everything under it to show?
If you want to remove the first n leading components of the file name, you need strip-components. So in your case, on extraction, do
tar xvf tarname.tar --strip-components=2
The man page has a list of tar's many options, including this one. Some earlier versions of tar use --strip-path for this operation instead.