How to Tar a Directory Without Retaining the Directory Structure

How do I tar a directory without retaining the directory structure?

cd /home/username/drupal/sites/default/files
tar czf ~/backup.tgz *

tar without retaining the directory structure

Use tar -C to change directory before creating the archive:

tar cz -C /path/to/dir . -f /path/to/archive.tar.gz
# archive.tar.gz gets contents of /path/to/dir as root entry:
# ./
# ./data.txt

If I got your PHP-code correctly, it would be something like:

$tar_dir = "/home/minecraft/multicraft/servers/$entry";
$archive = __DIR__ . "/tmp/$entry.tar.gz";
shell_exec("tar cz -C $tar_dir . -f $archive");

How do I tar the certain files of a directory without retaining the directory structure?

cd [dir]; tar cz ./* >x.tgz

or

cd [dir]; tar cz file1 file2 >x.tgz

Tar a directory, but don't store full absolute paths in the archive

tar -cjf site1.tar.bz2 -C /var/www/site1 .

In the above example, tar will change to directory /var/www/site1 before doing its thing because the option -C /var/www/site1 was given.

From man tar:

OTHER OPTIONS

  -C, --directory DIR
       change to directory DIR

Create tar-file without folder strucure

tar -cf a/b/c/tarfile.tar -C a/b/c . will switch to the directory a/b/c and read in the entire directory (the . - you could specify specific files as well, but a wildcard will not do what you're expecting). The -C <directory> <filelist> pattern can be repeated as necessary to process additional files from different locations.

Another possibility given your original example would be cd a/b/c; tar cf ../../../tarfile.tar *, but that doesn't give you the possibility to pull multiple files from different locations (of course you could still use -C, but the relative paths would have to be adjusted accordingly.

How do I extract files without folder structure using tar

You can use the --strip-components option of tar.

 --strip-components count
         (x mode only) Remove the specified number of leading path ele-
         ments.  Pathnames with fewer elements will be silently skipped.
         Note that the pathname is edited after checking inclusion/exclu-
         sion patterns but before security checks.

I create a tar file with a similar structure to yours:

$tar -tf tarfolder.tar
tarfolder/
tarfolder/file.a
tarfolder/file.b

$ls -la file.*
ls: file.*: No such file or directory

Then extracted by doing:

$tar -xf tarfolder.tar --strip-components 1
$ls -la file.*
-rw-r--r--  1 ericgorr  wheel  0 Jan 12 12:33 file.a
-rw-r--r--  1 ericgorr  wheel  0 Jan 12 12:33 file.b

Shell command to tar directory excluding certain files/folders

You can have multiple exclude options for tar so

$ tar --exclude='./folder' --exclude='./upload/folder2' -zcvf /backup/filename.tgz .

etc will work. Make sure to put --exclude before the source and destination items.

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