Tar Command – Tar Up All PDFs in a Directory Retaining Structure

findrecursivetar

I'm trying to create a compressed tarball that contains all PDF files that exist in one of my directories. The directory structure needs to be retained. Empty directories are not needed, but I really don't care if they're there.

For example, say I had a directory that looked like this:

dir
dir/subdir1
dir/subdir1/subsubdir1/song.mp3
dir/subdir2
dir/subdir2/subsubdir1
dir/subdir2/subsubdir1/document.pdf
dir/subdir2/subsubdir1/another-song.mp3
dir/subdir2/subsubdir1/top-ten-movies.txt
dir/subdir3
dir/subdir3/another-document.pdf

After running the command, I'd like to have dir.tar.gz contain this:

dir
dir/subdir2
dir/subdir2/subsubdir1
dir/subdir2/subsubdir1/document.pdf
dir/subdir3
dir/subdir3/another-document.pdf

Possible?

Best Answer

This will list all the PDFs:

$ find dir/ -name '*.pdf'
./dir/subdir2/subsubdir1/document.pdf
./dir/subdir3/another-document.pdf

You can pipe that to xargs to get it as a single space-delimited line, and feed that to tar to create the archive:

$ find dir/ -name '*.pdf' | xargs tar czf dir.tar.gz

_{(This way omits the empty directories)}

Related Solutions

Shell – Make Directory Copies Using Find Command

This is not a job for find, since there is no recursion involved.

for x in */C/populate.sh; do
  mkdir -- "${x%%/*}$suffix"
  mkdir -- "${x%%/*}$suffix/C"
  cp -p -- "$x" "./${x%%/*}$suffix/C"
done

Remove the -p option to cp if you don't want to preserve the files' modification time.

To generate a random suffix, BSD/Linux mktemp is as portable as it gets.

suffix=$(mktemp -u tmp_XXXXX)

If you want something vaguely random-looking and POSIX-compliant, this gives a string that changes every second and varies from location to location; you can't really do better with only POSIX tools:

suffix=$({ hostname; pwd; date; } |
         cksum | uuencode -m /dev/stdin | awk 'NR==2 {print substr($0,3,5)}')

If you put this code in a makefile, remember to:

double all $ signs;
put all the code on one line, using ; instead to separate shell instructions (you can use backslash+newline+tab to put a line break in the makefile, but that sequence is removed to build the shell command);
start the shell snippet with set -e, so that it aborts if there is any error.

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 {} +

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – Make Directory Copies Using Find Command

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

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