No, it's not a mistake, I mean dar, not tar.
It seems to be a not-so-popular archiving tool (and file format). However, I need to extract a single directory from a 4GiB .dar-file.
In the man-page, dar lists a whole bunch of options of which I've tried -I (--include <mask>). However, it seems to work on filenames without their path. I am overwhelmed by the number of options.
While typing my question and reading the man page more thoroughly, it came to me that the answering flag is -g, so to extract from an archive a single directory into the current one, use:
dar -x archive-name -g dir/to/extract
According to the man page, dar features six different parameters for file selection, namely -I vs -X, -P vs -g and -[ vs -].
The interesting one to this question has the following description:
-g, --go-into <path>Files or directory to only take in account, as opposed to -P. -g may be present several time on command-line. Same thing here, the difference with -I is that the mask is applied to the path+filename and also concerns directories. By default all files under the -R directory are considered. Else, if one or more -g option is given, just those are selected (if they do not match any -P option). All paths given this way must be relative to the -R directory. This is equivalent as giving out of any option.
Warning, -g option cannot receive wildcards, these would not be interpreted.