How to use tar to compress a group of files in a .txt file

tar

I have a lot of filenames that listed in a .txt file called to_be_archived_files.txt, and its content is as:

~/Documents/dir1/a.html
~/Documents/dir1/b.html
~/Documents/dir1/c/1.html

How do I add all of them into a archive.tar.gz by tar?

I want something like:

tar czf archive.tar.gz -FROM-FILELIST=to_be_archived_files.zip

How can I achieve that?

Best Answer

Use the -T option:

 -T, --files-from FILE
       get names to extract or create from FILE

Note that it doesn't work with ~ as alias for home directory, you need to specify the folder explicitly.

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Tar: how can I exclude intermediate directories but include leaf directories

find can take -o for "or", so you can combine your two find commands like so:

find . \( -type f -o -type d -empty \) -print0 | tar ...

Or, if you can guarantee all the files can fit on one command line,

find . \( -type f -o -type d -empty \) -exec tar cvfz files.tgz {} +

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).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tar: how can I exclude intermediate directories but include leaf directories

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

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