How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself

Question

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

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You can also create archive as usual and extract it with   tar --strip-components 1 -xvf my directory tar gz

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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

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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

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cd my directory  amp  amp  tar -czvf    my directory tar gz   ls -A   amp  amp  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

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function tar create             local folder  quot   1  quot                   local tar  quot   basename  quot   folder  quot   quot  tar gz                  cd  quot   folder  quot   amp  amp  tar -zcvf  quot      tar  quot     cd -  amp  gt   dev null    Example  tar create  path to folder  You are welcome

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Command find my directory  -maxdepth 1 -printf  quot  P n quot    tar -cvf my archive tar -C my directory  -T - This creates a standard archive file  Standard in a way that files and dirs you want to pack are in the root of the archive  There are no extra special files as     and dirs as    before each    file   Trying so many solutions which are already here with only one successfully  seems to me that using find or possibly other commands like ls -A -1 on the left side of the pipe  -1 as  one   not -l as  L   is the only way to achieve above goal  If tar file is further processed  or delivered to someone as a product of my work  then I don t want to have some weirdness there  Arguments description -maxdepth 1 Descend at most 1 level - No recursing  -printf print format on the standard output  P     File s name with the name of the starting-point under which it was found removed   n     Newline printf does not add a newline at the end of the string  It must be added here tar  -C DIR  --directory DIR change to directory DIR -T FILE  --files-from FILE get names to extract or create from FILE - that FILE from above is the standard input  from the pipe  Comments on other solutions  The same result might be achieved using solution described by  aross  The difference with the solution here is in that which tool is doing the recursing  If you leave the job to find  every filepath name  goes through the pipe  It also sends all directory names  which tar with --no-recursion ignores or adds as empty ones followed by all files in each directory  If there was unexpected output as errors in file read from find  tar would not know or care what s going on  But with further checks  like processing error stream from find  it might be a good solution where many options and filters on files are required  I prefer to leave the recursing on tar  it does seem simpler and as such more stable solution  With my complicated directory structure  I feel more confident the archive is complete when tar will not report an error  Another solution using find proposed by  serendrewpity seems to be fine  but it fails on filenames with spaces  Difference is that output from find supplied by     sub-shell is space-divided  It might be possible to add quotes using printf  but it would further complicate the statement  There is no reason to cd into the my directory and then back  while using    my archive tar for tar path  because TAR has -C DIR  --directory DIR command which is there just for this purpose  Using    dot  will include dots Using   will let shell supply the input file list  It might be possible using shell options to include dot files  But it s complicated  The command must be executed in shell which allows that  Enabling and disabling must be done before and after tar command  And it will fail if root dir of future archive contains too many files  That last point also applies to all those solutions which are not using pipe  Most of solutions are creating a dir inside which are the files and dirs  That is barely ever desired

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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

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Use pax   Pax is a deprecated package but does the job perfectly and in a simple fashion   pax -w  gt  mydir tar mydir

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tar -czvf mydir tgz -C my dir   ls -A mydir   Run it one level above mydir  This won t include any     or stuff

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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

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Simplest way I found   cd my dir  amp  amp  tar -czvf    my dir tar gz

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cd my directory tar zcvf    my directory tar gz

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This is what works for me   tar -cvf my dir tar gz -C  my dir    find  my dir  -maxdepth 1 -printf   P      You could also use  tar -cvf my dir tar gz -C  my dir    find  my dir  -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -printf   P      In the first command  find returns a list of files and sub-directories of my dir  However  the directory my dir is itself included in that list as     The -printf parameter removes the full path including that     and also all crlf However the space in the format string   P   of printf leaves a remnant in the list of files and sub-directories of my dir and can be seen by a leading space in the result of the find command    That will not be a problem for TAR but if you want to fix this  add -mindepth 1 as in the second command

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cd my directory   amp  amp  tar -zcvf    my dir tgz    amp  amp  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   amp  amp  tar -zcvf    my dir tgz    amp  amp  cd         file1   file2    hiddenfile1    hiddenfile2   tar ztf my dir tgz      file1   file2    hiddenfile1    hiddenfile2

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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

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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

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tar all files within and deeper in a given directory   with no prefixes   neither  lt directory gt   nor        parameters   lt source directory gt   lt target archive file gt  function tar all in dir         cd   1   amp  amp  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

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tar -C my dir -zcvf my dir tar gz  ls my dir

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cd DIRECTORY tar -czf NAME tar gz     the asterisk will include everything even hidden ones

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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  gt  textfile txt  gt  documentation pdf  gt  subfolder2  gt  subfolder  gt  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  gt  textfile txt  gt  subfolder2  gt  subfolder  gt  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 -

[archive] How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself?

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