tar add all files and directories in current directory INCLUDING svn and so on

Question

I try to tar gz a directory and use  tar -czf workspace tar gz     The resulting tar includes  svn directories in subdirs but NOT in the current directory  as   gets expanded to only  visible  files before it is passed to tar  I tried to   tar -czf workspace tar gz   instead but then I am getting an error because     has changed while reading   tar    workspace tar gz  file changed as we read it   Is there a trick so that   matches all files  including dot-prefixed  in a directory    using bash on Linux SLES-11  2 6 27 19

User · Answer

Don t create the tar file in the directory you are packing up   tar -czf  tmp workspace tar gz     does the trick  except it will extract the files all over the current directory when you unpack   Better to do   cd    tar -czf workspace tar gz workspace   or  if you don t know the name of the directory you were in   base   basename  PWD  cd    tar -czf  base tar gz  base    This assumes that you didn t follow symlinks to get to where you are and that the shell doesn t try to second guess you by jumping backwards through a symlink - bash is not trustworthy in this respect   If you have to worry about that  use cd -P    to do a physical change directory   Stupid that it is not the default behaviour in my view - confusing  at least  for those for whom cd    never had any alternative meaning      One comment in the discussion says      I       need to exclude the top directory and I       need to place the tar in the base directory    The first part of the comment does not make much sense - if the tar file contains the current directory  it won t be created when you extract file from that archive because  by definition  the current directory already exists  except in very weird circumstances    The second part of the comment can be dealt with in one of two ways    Either  create the file somewhere else -  tmp is one possible location - and then move it back to the original location after it is complete  Or  if you are using GNU Tar  use the --exclude workspace tar gz option   The string after the   is a pattern - the example is the simplest pattern - an exact match   You might need to specify --exclude   workspace tar gz if you are working in the current directory contrary to recommendations  you might need to specify --exclude workspace workspace tar gz if you are working up one level as suggested   If you have multiple tar files to exclude  use      as in --exclude     gz

User · Answer

There are a couple of steps to take    Replace   by   to include hidden files as well  To create the archive in the same directory a --exclude workspace tar gz can be used to exclude the archive itself  To prevent the tar     file changed as we read it error when the archive is not yet created  make sure it exists  e g  using touch   so the --exclude matches with the archive filename   It does not match it the file does not exists    Combined this results in the following script   touch workspace tar gz tar -czf workspace tar gz --exclude workspace tar gz

User · Answer

You can fix the   form by using --exclude   tar -czf workspace tar gz --exclude workspace tar gz

User · Answer

If you really don t want to include top directory in the tarball  and that s generally bad idea    tar czf workspace tar gz -C  path to workspace

User · Answer

The problem with the most solutions provided here is that tar contains    at the begging of every entry  So this results in having   directory when opening it through GUI compressor  So what I ended up doing is   ls -1A   xargs -d   n  tar cfz my tar gz  If you already have my tar gz in current directory you may want to grep this out   ls -1A   grep -v my tar gz   xargs -d   n  tar cfz my tar gz  Be aware of that xargs has certain limit  see xargs --show-limits   So this solution would not work if you are trying to create a package which has lots of entries  directories and files  on a directory which you are trying to tar

User · Answer

A good question  In ZSH you can use the globbing modifier  D   which stands for  dotfiles   Compare   ls  HOME     and  ls  HOME   D    This correctly excludes the special directory entries   and     In Bash you can use    to include the dotfiles explicitly   ls  HOME    HOME      But that includes   and    as well  so it s not what you were looking for  I m sure there s some way to make   match dotfiles in bash  too

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10 years later  you have an alternative to tar  illustrated with Git 2 30  Q1 2021   which uses  quot git archive quot  man  to produce the release tarball instead of tar   You don t need Git 2 30 to apply that alternative  See commit 4813277  11 Oct 2020   and commit 93e7031  10 Oct 2020  by Ren   Scharfe  rscharfe    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 63e5273  27 Oct 2020   Makefile  use git init add commit archive for dist-doc Signed-off-by  Ren   Scharfe   Reduce the dependency on external tools by generating the distribution archives for HTML documentation and manpages using git man  commands instead of tar  This gives the archive entries the same meta data as those in the dist archive for binaries   So instead of  tar cf    archive tar    You can do using Git only  git -C workspace init git -C workspace add   git -C workspace commit -m workspace git -C workspace archive --format tar --prefix    HEAD  tree   gt  workspace tar rm -Rf workspace  git  That was initially proposed because  as explained here  some exotic platform might have an old tar distribution with lacking options

User · Answer

Had a similar situation myself  I think it is best to create the tar elsewhere and then use -C to tell tar the base directory for the compressed files  Example   tar -cjf workspace tar gz -C  lt path to workspace gt    ls -A  lt path to workspace gt     This way there is no need to exclude your own tarfile  As noted in other comments  -A will list hidden files

User · Answer

Update  I added a fix for the OP s comment   tar -czf workspace tar gz     will indeed change the current directory  but why not place the file somewhere else   tar -czf somewhereelse workspace tar gz   mv somewhereelse workspace tar gz     Update

User · Answer

You can include the hidden directories by going back a directory and doing   cd    tar czf workspace tar gz workspace   Assuming the directory you wanted to gzip was called workspace

User · Answer

tar -czf workspace tar gz          Specifying      will include  dot  files and directories that have at least 2 characters after the dot   The down side is it will not include files directories with a single character after the dot  such as  a  if there are any

User · Answer

Actually the problem is with the compression options  The trick is the pipe the tar result to a compressor instead of using the built-in options  Incidentally that can also give you better compression  since you can set extra compresion options   Minimal tar   tar --exclude   tar  -cf workspace tar     Pipe to a compressor of your choice  This example is verbose and uses xz with maximum compression   tar --exclude   tar  -cv     xz -9v  gt workspace tar xz   Solution was tested on Ubuntu 14 04 and Cygwin on Windows 7  It s a community wiki answer  so feel free to edit if you spot a mistake

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Yet another solution  assuming the number of items in the folder is not huge   tar -czf workspace tar gz  ls -A     ls -A prints normal and hidden files but not     and      as ls -a does

User · Answer

in directory want to compress  current directory  try this    tar -czf workspace tar gz   --exclude     gz

User · Answer

Using find is probably the easiest way   find   -maxdepth 1 -exec tar zcvf workspace tar gz         find   -maxdepth 1 will find all files directories symlinks etc in the current directory and run the command specified by -exec  The    in the command means file list goes here and    means that the command will be run as   tar zcvf workspace tar gz  file1  file2  dir3   instead of  tar zcvf workspace tar gz  file1 tar zcvf workspace tar gz  file2 tar zcvf workspace tar gz  dir3

User · Answer

If disk space space is not an issue  this could also be a very easy thing to do    mkdir backup cp -r     backup tar -zcvf backup tar gz   backup

[linux] tar: add all files and directories in current directory INCLUDING .svn and so on

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