Tar a Directory, But Don't Store Full Absolute Paths in the Archive

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

How do I exclude absolute paths for tar?

If you want to remove the first n leading components of the file name, you need strip-components. So in your case, on extraction, do

tar xvf tarname.tar --strip-components=2

The man page has a list of tar's many options, including this one. Some earlier versions of tar use --strip-path for this operation instead.

How to create a tar archive from an absolute path and package files as if they were relative?

You can use the -C option to change the directory before performing any operations:

tar czf /home/user1/Documents/folder1.tar.gz -C /home/user1/Documents folder1

Now, the contents of your archive will look like this:

$ tar tf /home/user1/Documents/folder1.tar.gz 
folder1/
folder1/file1

The message you get is not an error, by the way. It's tar telling you that it made the paths in the archive relative so as to avoid overwriting files, which could easily happen when unpacking an archive with absolute paths. You can turn off the leading slash removal with -P, but you often don't want that.

How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself?

cd my_directory/ && tar -zcvf ../my_dir.tgz . && cd - 

should do the job in one line. It works well for hidden files as well. "*" doesn't expand hidden files by path name expansion at least in bash. Below is my experiment:

$ mkdir my_directory
$ touch my_directory/file1
$ touch my_directory/file2
$ touch my_directory/.hiddenfile1
$ touch my_directory/.hiddenfile2
$ cd my_directory/ && tar -zcvf ../my_dir.tgz . && cd ..
./
./file1
./file2
./.hiddenfile1
./.hiddenfile2
$ tar ztf my_dir.tgz
./
./file1
./file2
./.hiddenfile1
./.hiddenfile2

tar file preserves full path. how to stop it?

you can cheat..

exec('cd /path/to/tmp_folder/ && tar -cvf /path/to/myfile.tar innerfolder/');

This would would give your users just the innerfolder when they extracted the tarball

Unix tar: do not preserve full pathnames

Use -C to specify the directory from which the files look like you want, and then specify the files as seen from that directory:

tar -cvzf test.tar.gz -C /home/path test

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

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

Tar files from different directories without paths

If you know the filenames and their directories you can use the -C/--directory option to have tar change its operating directory as it processes arguments.

So this command:

tar -cf files.tar.gz -C folder1/folder2 file1 file2 -C ../folder3/folder4 file3 file4

will create files.tar.gz in the current directory with just the files in it.

You can automate creating the necessary command line arguments from find output or similar with a little bit of scripting if necessary.

(You can't use globs like folder1/folder2/* in the file argument positions because the paths in those filenames will cause tar to fail to find them. You can use $(ls folder1/folder2/) in that position but that's obviously not safe for many valid filenames.)

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