Pack file with tar.gz from root directory

gziptar

I try to pack a .csv file with tar.gz, while being in the root directory.

The file myfile.csv is located at /mnt/sdb1/
So the full filename is /mnt/sdb1/myfile.csv

I try to save the tar.gz under /mnt/sdb1/old_files

I tried it like this:

tar -czf /mnt/sdb1/old_files/new.tar.gz mnt/sdb1/myfile.csv

But when i extract the file, then a folder with name "mnt" will be extracted which cointains another folder called "sdb1", which contains the file.

Is it possible to compress the file only, instead of copying all the directories?

Best Answer

use the --directory option from man tar :

-C,- -directory DIR

change to directory DIR

i.e.:

tar -C /mnt/sdb1/ -czf /mnt/sdb1/old_files/new.tar.gz myfile.csv

Related Solutions

Tar compression without directory structure

I think you can do this with the -C option.

From the tar man page:

-C directory, --cd directory, --directory directory
    In c and r mode, this changes the directory before adding the following files.
    In x mode, change directories after opening the archive but before extracting
    entries from the archive.

This means that you should be able to run

tar cvzf result.tar.gz -C /path/to/dir1/ . -C /path/to/dir2/ .

to achieve what you want.

Tar extract into directory with same base name

With gnu tar, you could use --xform (or --transform) to prepend /prefix/ to each file name:

tar -xf myArchive.tar.gz --xform='s|^|myArchive/|S'

note there's no leading / in prefix/ and the sed expression ends with S to exclude symbolic link targets from file name transformations.
To test it (dry-run):

tar -tf myArchive.tar.gz --xform='s|^|myArchive/|S' --verbose --show-transformed-names

To get you started, here's a very simplistic script that you could invoke as extract <file>:

STRIP=${1%.*}                                #strip last suffix
NAME=${STRIP%.tar}                           #strip .tar suffix, if present
tar -xf "$1" --xform="s|^|$NAME/|S"          #run command

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tar compression without directory structure

Tar extract into directory with same base name

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