How safely convert folder into tarball

The correct command is

tar cvf /tmp/tarball.tar -C target_directory . 

NOTES:

•  * instead of . can't be used as this excludes hidden files and file with spaces in the name. So  the only correct variant is using dot:

  tar -cvf /tmp/tarball.tar -C target_directory .

• The option -C should be the last option as tar evaluates options sequentially, one by one.

If you want to delete files in the same step you can use option --remove-files (this option removes both files and directories  -- the whole tree as expected)

tar -cvf /tmp/tarball.tar --remove-files -C target_directory . 

You can specify the option --remove-files before your other arguments like this:

tar --remove-files -cvf /tmp/tarball.tar -C target_directory . 

NOTE:

Usefulness of the option --remove-files entails some of the risks of rm operation (Creative uses of rm )

For example if your -C parameter is wrong (say  -C / ) you can damage system directories.  You can remove files later yourself using Saferm -- wrapper for rm command  with more control over the results then tar provides.

Tips

1. Always check tar return code after the operation. Tarball can well be incomplete. I would recommend to check the tarball content against the tree using tar  -d option in a separate step. Of course, for large tarball (say, over 1TB) this operation is excruciatingly slow, but this is too important operation to skip
2. Already create manifest to store with the tarball using the command:

   tar tvf tarrball-name > tarball_name.manifest

3. Create md5 sum and store it as a separate file to verity that tarball is intact.
4. If you run tar not as root you need to ensure that all files are readable to this particular user. I would recommend doing this as a separate step before the creation of the tarball.
5. Manual entering of rm command after creation of the tarball is a very dangerous operation and unless it is pre-programmed and checked in your script you can remove wrong files for which tarball do not still exists.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20190729 : How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself - Stack Overflow ( Jan 5, 2017 , stackoverflow.com )

Old News ;-)

[Jul 29, 2019] How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself - Stack Overflow

Jan 5, 2017 | stackoverflow.com

How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself? Ask Question Asked 10 years, 1 month ago Active 8 months ago Viewed 464k times 348 105

---

tvanfosson ,Jan 5, 2017 at 12:29

I typically do:

tar -czvf my_directory.tar.gz my_directory

What if I just want to include everything (including any hidden system files) in my_directory, but not the directory itself? I don't want:

my_directory
   --- my_file
   --- my_file
   --- my_file

I want:

my_file
my_file
my_file

PanCrit ,Feb 19 at 13:04

cd my_directory/ && tar -zcvf ../my_dir.tgz . && cd -

should do the job in one line. It works well for hidden files as well. "*" doesn't expand hidden files by path name expansion at least in bash. Below is my experiment:

$ mkdir my_directory
$ touch my_directory/file1
$ touch my_directory/file2
$ touch my_directory/.hiddenfile1
$ touch my_directory/.hiddenfile2
$ cd my_directory/ && tar -zcvf ../my_dir.tgz . && cd ..
./
./file1
./file2
./.hiddenfile1
./.hiddenfile2
$ tar ztf my_dir.tgz
./
./file1
./file2
./.hiddenfile1
./.hiddenfile2

JCotton ,Mar 3, 2015 at 2:46

Use the -C switch of tar:

tar -czvf my_directory.tar.gz -C my_directory .

The -C my_directory tells tar to change the current directory to my_directory , and then . means "add the entire current directory" (including hidden files and sub-directories).

Make sure you do -C my_directory before you do . or else you'll get the files in the current directory.

Digger ,Mar 23 at 6:52

You can also create archive as usual and extract it with:

tar --strip-components 1 -xvf my_directory.tar.gz

jwg ,Mar 8, 2017 at 12:56

Have a look at --transform / --xform , it gives you the opportunity to massage the file name as the file is added to the archive:

% mkdir my_directory
% touch my_directory/file1
% touch my_directory/file2
% touch my_directory/.hiddenfile1
% touch my_directory/.hiddenfile2
% tar -v -c -f my_dir.tgz --xform='s,my_directory/,,' $(find my_directory -type f)
my_directory/file2
my_directory/.hiddenfile1
my_directory/.hiddenfile2
my_directory/file1
% tar -t -f my_dir.tgz 
file2
.hiddenfile1
.hiddenfile2
file1

Transform expression is similar to that of sed , and we can use separators other than / ( , in the above example).
https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/tar_52.html

Alex ,Mar 31, 2017 at 15:40

TL;DR

find /my/dir/ -printf "%P\n" | tar -czf mydir.tgz --no-recursion -C /my/dir/ -T -

With some conditions (archive only files, dirs and symlinks):

find /my/dir/ -printf "%P\n" -type f -o -type l -o -type d | tar -czf mydir.tgz --no-recursion -C /my/dir/ -T -

Explanation

The below unfortunately includes a parent directory ./ in the archive:

tar -czf mydir.tgz -C /my/dir .

You can move all the files out of that directory by using the --transform configuration option, but that doesn't get rid of the . directory itself. It becomes increasingly difficult to tame the command.

You could use $(find ...) to add a file list to the command (like in magnus' answer ), but that potentially causes a "file list too long" error. The best way is to combine it with tar's -T option, like this:

find /my/dir/ -printf "%P\n" -type f -o -type l -o -type d | tar -czf mydir.tgz --no-recursion -C /my/dir/ -T -

Basically what it does is list all files ( -type f ), links ( -type l ) and subdirectories ( -type d ) under your directory, make all filenames relative using -printf "%P\n" , and then pass that to the tar command (it takes filenames from STDIN using -T - ). The -C option is needed so tar knows where the files with relative names are located. The --no-recursion flag is so that tar doesn't recurse into folders it is told to archive (causing duplicate files).

If you need to do something special with filenames (filtering, following symlinks etc), the find command is pretty powerful, and you can test it by just removing the tar part of the above command:

$ find /my/dir/ -printf "%P\n" -type f -o -type l -o -type d
> textfile.txt
> documentation.pdf
> subfolder2
> subfolder
> subfolder/.gitignore

For example if you want to filter PDF files, add ! -name '*.pdf'

$ find /my/dir/ -printf "%P\n" -type f ! -name '*.pdf' -o -type l -o -type d
> textfile.txt
> subfolder2
> subfolder
> subfolder/.gitignore

Non-GNU find

The command uses printf (available in GNU find ) which tells find to print its results with relative paths. However, if you don't have GNU find , this works to make the paths relative (removes parents with sed ):

find /my/dir/ -type f -o -type l -o -type d | sed s,^/my/dir/,, | tar -czf mydir.tgz --no-recursion -C /my/dir/ -T -

BrainStone ,Dec 21, 2016 at 22:14

This Answer should work in most situations. Notice however how the filenames are stored in the tar file as, for example, ./file1 rather than just file1 . I found that this caused problems when using this method to manipulate tarballs used as package files in BuildRoot .

One solution is to use some Bash globs to list all files except for .. like this:

tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz .[^.]* ..?* *

This is a trick I learnt from this answer .

Now tar will return an error if there are no files matching ..?* or .[^.]* , but it will still work. If the error is a problem (you are checking for success in a script), this works:

shopt -s nullglob
tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz .[^.]* ..?* *
shopt -u nullglob

Though now we are messing with shell options, we might decide that it is neater to have * match hidden files:

shopt -s dotglob
tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz *
shopt -u dotglob

This might not work where your shell globs * in the current directory, so alternatively, use:

shopt -s dotglob
cd my_dir
tar -zcvf ../my_dir.tar.gz *
cd ..
shopt -u dotglob

PanCrit ,Jun 14, 2010 at 6:47

cd my_directory
tar zcvf ../my_directory.tar.gz *

anion ,May 11, 2018 at 14:10

If it's a Unix/Linux system, and you care about hidden files (which will be missed by *), you need to do:

cd my_directory
tar zcvf ../my_directory.tar.gz * .??*

I don't know what hidden files look like under Windows.

gpz500 ,Feb 27, 2014 at 10:46

I would propose the following Bash function (first argument is the path to the dir, second argument is the basename of resulting archive):

function tar_dir_contents ()
{
    local DIRPATH="$1"
    local TARARCH="$2.tar.gz"
    local ORGIFS="$IFS"
    IFS=$'\n'
    tar -C "$DIRPATH" -czf "$TARARCH" $( ls -a "$DIRPATH" | grep -v '\(^\.$\)\|\(^\.\.$\)' )
    IFS="$ORGIFS"
}

You can run it in this way:

$ tar_dir_contents /path/to/some/dir my_archive

and it will generate the archive my_archive.tar.gz within current directory. It works with hidden (.*) elements and with elements with spaces in their filename.

med ,Feb 9, 2017 at 17:19

cd my_directory && tar -czvf ../my_directory.tar.gz $(ls -A) && cd ..

This one worked for me and it's include all hidden files without putting all files in a root directory named "." like in tomoe's answer :

Breno Salgado ,Apr 16, 2016 at 15:42

Use pax.

Pax is a deprecated package but does the job perfectly and in a simple fashion.

pax -w > mydir.tar mydir

asynts ,Jun 26 at 16:40

Simplest way I found:

cd my_dir && tar -czvf ../my_dir.tar.gz *

marcingo ,Aug 23, 2016 at 18:04

# tar all files within and deeper in a given directory
# with no prefixes ( neither <directory>/ nor ./ )
# parameters: <source directory> <target archive file>
function tar_all_in_dir {
    { cd "$1" && find -type f -print0; } \
    | cut --zero-terminated --characters=3- \
    | tar --create --file="$2" --directory="$1" --null --files-from=-
}

Safely handles filenames with spaces or other unusual characters. You can optionally add a -name '*.sql' or similar filter to the find command to limit the files included.

user1456599 ,Feb 13, 2013 at 21:37

 tar -cvzf  tarlearn.tar.gz --remove-files mytemp/*

If the folder is mytemp then if you apply the above it will zip and remove all the files in the folder but leave it alone

 tar -cvzf  tarlearn.tar.gz --remove-files --exclude='*12_2008*' --no-recursion mytemp/*

You can give exclude patterns and also specify not to look into subfolders too

Aaron Digulla ,Jun 2, 2009 at 15:33

tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz `ls my_dir`

Recommended Links

Softpanorama Recommended

Top articles

Sites

archive - How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself - Stack Overflow

Create a tar file of an entire directory and its sub-directories

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: August 28, 2019