'Tar' the result of a 'find', preserving the directory structure

Question

I want to tar all the *.txt files that I get as the result of a find command, that exist in a directory having a tree structure like this:

• Directory_name
• • dir1
• • • file1.pdf
• • • file1.txt
• • dir2
• • • file2.pdf
• • • file2.txt
• • dir3
• • • file3.pdf
• • • file3.txt

(the filenames are just examples).

But I want to preserve the directory structure.

What command can give me a tar.gz file with this content?

• dir1
• • file1.txt
• dir2
• • file2.txt
• dir3
• • file3.txt

Answer 1

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).