Tar question

[Charles Howse]

I'm a little confused about the arguments for tar.
I want to tar the contents of a directory and save that .tgz file for
backup purposes.

Problem is, when I copy larry.tgz to /disk2 and:
Tar xvfz larry.tgz
It creates the /disk2 file structure within /disk2.

# cd
# ls /disk2
# freebsd larry (directories)
# tar cvfz larry.tgz /disk2
# cp larry.tgz /disk2
# cd /disk2
# tar xvfz larry.tgz
# ls 
# freebsd larry disk2 (directories)

How can I make tar not create the directory structure within the same
directory?
Does that make sense?
I tried tar cvfzP, no joy.

Man tar didn't have anything that jumped out at me, but I could have
missed or misunderstood something.
If the solution is in the man page, I would appreciate a reference to
the section, so I can re-read it to understand.



Thanks,
Charles