Find files and tar them with spaces

Question

Alright  so simple problem here  I m working on a simple back up code   It works fine except if the files have spaces in them   This is how I m finding files and adding them to a tar archive   find   -type f   xargs tar -czvf backup tar gz    The problem is when the file has a space in the name because tar thinks that it s a folder   Basically is there a way I can add quotes around the results from find  Or a different way to fix this

User · Answer

Why not   tar czvf backup tar gz     Sure it s clever to use find and then xargs  but you re doing it the hard way   Update  Porges has commented with a find-option that I think is a better answer than my answer  or the other one  find -print0       xargs -0

User · Answer

Another solution as seen here   find var log  -iname  anaconda    -exec tar -cvzf file tar gz

User · Answer

Big warning on several of the solutions  and your own test    When you do   anything   xargs something xargs will try to fit  quot as many arguments as possible quot  after  quot something quot   but then you may end up with multiple invocations of  quot something quot   So your attempt    find       xargs tar czvf file tgz may end up overwriting  quot file tgz quot  at each invocation of  quot tar quot  by xargs  and you end up with only the last invocation   the chosen solution uses a GNU -T special parameter to avoid the problem  but not everyone has that GNU tar available  You could do instead  find   -type f -print0   xargs -0 tar -rvf backup tar gzip backup tar  Proof of the problem on cygwin    mkdir test   cd test   seq 1 10000   sed -e  quot s   long filename   quot    xargs touch        create the files   seq 1 10000   sed -e  quot s   long filename   quot    xargs tar czvf archive tgz       will invoke tar several time as it can f fit 10000 long filenames into 1   tar tzvf archive tgz   wc -l 60       in my own machine  I end up with only the 60 last filenames         as the last invocation of tar by xargs overwrote the previous one s     proper way to invoke tar  with -r   which append to an existing tar file  whereas c would overwrite it    caveat  you can t have it compressed  you can t add to a compressed archive    seq 1 10000   sed -e  quot s   long filename   quot    xargs tar rvf archive tar  -r  and without z   gzip archive tar   tar tzvf archive tar gz   wc -l 10000      we have all our files  despite xargs making several invocations of the tar command     Note  that behavior of xargs is a well know diccifulty  and it is also why  when someone wants to do   find        xargs grep  quot regex quot   they intead have to write it  find         xargs grep  quot regex quot   dev null  That way  even if the last invocation of grep by xargs appends only 1 filename  grep sees at least 2 filenames  as each time it has   dev null  where it won t find anything  and the filename s  appended by xargs after it  and thus will always display the file names when something maches  quot regex quot   Otherwise you may end up with the last results showing matches without a filename in front

User · Answer

If you have multiple files or directories and you want to zip them into independent   gz file you can do this  Optional -type f -atime   find -name  httpd-log  txt  -type f -mtime  1 -exec tar -vzcf    gz         This will compress   httpd-log01 txt httpd-log02 txt   to  httpd-log01 txt gz httpd-log02 txt gz

User · Answer

There could be another way to achieve what you want  Basically    Use the find command to output path to whatever files you re looking for  Redirect stdout to a filename of your choosing  Then tar with the -T option which allows it to take a list of file locations  the one you just created with find    find   -name    whatever   gt  yourListOfFiles tar -cvf yourfile tar -T yourListOfFiles

User · Answer

Try running       find   -type f   xargs -d   n  tar -czvf backup tar gz

User · Answer

Use this   find   -type f -print0   tar -czvf backup tar gz --null -T -   It will    deal with files with spaces  newlines  leading dashes  and other funniness handle an unlimited number of files won t repeatedly overwrite your backup tar gz like using tar -c with xargs will do when you have a large number of files   Also see    GNU tar manual How can I build a tar from stdin   search for null

User · Answer

Would add a comment to  Steve Kehlet post but need 50 rep  RIP    For anyone that has found this post through numerous googling  I found a way to not only find specific files given a time range  but also NOT include the relative paths OR whitespaces that would cause tarring errors   THANK YOU SO MUCH STEVE    find   -name    pdf  -type f -mtime 0 -printf   f 0    tar -czvf  dir zip tar gz --null -T -      relative directory  -name    pdf  look for pdfs  or any file type   -type f type to look for is a file  -mtime 0 look for files created in last 24 hours -printf   f 0  Regular -print0 OR -printf   f  did NOT work for me  From man pages        This quoting is performed in the same way as for GNU ls  This is not the same quoting mechanism as the one used for -ls and -fls  If you are able to decide what format to use for the output of find then it is normally better to use   0  as a terminator than to use newline  as file names can contain white space and newline characters     -czvf create archive  filter the archive through gzip   verbosely list files processed  archive name   Edit 2019-08-14  I would like to add  that I was also able to use essentially use the same command in my comment  just using tar itself   tar -czvf  archiveDir test tar gz --newer-mtime 0 --ignore-failed-read   pdf   Needed --ignore-failed-read in-case there were no new PDFs for today

User · Answer

The best solution seem to be to create a file list and then archive files because you can use other sources and do something else with the list   For example this allows using the list to calculate size of the files being archived      bin sh  backupFileName  backup-big-  date    Y m d- H M    backupRoot   var www  backupOutPath     archivePath  backupOutPath backupFileName tar gz listOfFilesPath  backupOutPath backupFileName filelist      Make a list of files directories to archive   echo     gt   listOfFilesPath echo    backupRoot  uploads   gt  gt   listOfFilesPath echo    backupRoot  extra user data   gt  gt   listOfFilesPath find    backupRoot  drupal root sites   -name  files  -type d  gt  gt   listOfFilesPath      Size calculation   sizeForProgress   cat  listOfFilesPath   while read nextFile do     if     -z   nextFile     then         du -sb   nextFile      fi done   awk   size   1  END  print size          Archive with progress      simple with dump of all files currently archived  tar -czvf  archivePath -T  listOfFilesPath    progress bar sizeForShow     sizeForProgress 1024 1024   echo -e   nRunning backup  source files are  sizeForShow MiB  n  tar -cPp -T  listOfFilesPath   pv -s  sizeForProgress   gzip  gt   archivePath

User · Answer

Why not give something like this a try  tar cvf scala tar  find src -name   scala

[linux] Find files and tar them (with spaces)

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