How to add files from a folder to archive instead of the folders itself

tar

this is not a duplicate of creating a tar archive without including parent directory

If I do tar -czf archive directory, directory will be added to the archive. I want to add the files of the folder directory not the directory itself, how?
please suggest answer that does not involve cding to directory

this is not a duplicate of what its showing:
I have a directory called somedir with contents as abc, xyz:

ls somedir
abc xyz

I want to make archive that will contain files abc, xyz, not somedir folder

Update:
if i use the command tar -C /home/username/dir1/dir2 -cvf temp.tar yourarchive (which the answer to the question of which my question is called duplicate of)

i get this:

enter image description here

what I wanted is tar czf archive.tar.gz -C yourarchive ., I get this (which is close enough of what I wanted):

enter image description here

what I wanted was is this (directly files, no folder):

enter image description here

Best Answer

Use -C:

tar czf archive -C directory .

This instructs tar to use directory as its working directory, and archive everything contained in the directory (.).

Using -C is nearly equivalent to using cd; archive above is interpreted relative to the current directory when tar starts, then tar changes its working directory to directory before interpreting ..

I'm not sure how widespread support for tar -C is, but any Linux distribution should support it.

Related Solutions

Bash – ‘Tar’ the result of a ‘find’, preserving the directory structure

You can use xargs to feed the output of a command as arguments to another:

find . -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 tar zcvf the_tarball.tar.gz

Note here the -print0 from find and -0 from xargs work in conjunction to delimit file names correctly (so that names with spaces and such aren't a problem).

Unix : how to tar only N first files of each folder

If your pax supports the -0 option, with zsh:

print -rN dir/**/*(D/e:'reply=($REPLY/*(ND^/[1,10]))':) |
  pax -w0 | xz > file.tar.xz

It includes the first 10 non-directory files of each directory in the list sorted by file name. You can choose a different sorting order by adding the om glob qualifier (order by modification time, Om to reverse the order), oL (order by length), non (sort by name but numerically)...

If you don't have the standard pax command, or it doesn't support -0 but you have the GNU tar command, you can do:

print -rN -- dir/**/*(D/e:'reply=($REPLY/*(ND^/[1,10]))':) |
  tar --null -T - -cjf file.tar.xz

If you can't use zsh, but have access to bash (the shell of the GNU project), you could do:

find dir -type d -exec bash -O nullglob -O dotglob -c '
  for dir do
    set -- "$dir/*"; n=0
    for file do
      if [ ! -d "$file" ] || [ -L "$file" ]; then
        printf "%s\0" "$file"
        (( n++ < 10 )) || break
      fi
    done
  done' bash {} + | pax -0w | xz > file.tar.xz

That would be significantly less efficient though.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – ‘Tar’ the result of a ‘find’, preserving the directory structure

Unix : how to tar only N first files of each folder

Related Question