Tar remote dir without leading ./ on files

Question

I have several scripts that run and collect data which is then fed into other scripts. So this entire chain is automated. At one point in the automation, all data files are tarred up to be sent for processing. The command I am using is this:

tar -zchvf "$target_dir" -C "$data_dir" .

Where target_dir is where my tarball is going and data_dir is where my data is located.

Now this is working fine; however, the files in my tarball look like this:

./file1
./file2
 <etc>

The post processing script is messing up because of the leading ./ on these files. It is expecting them to look like this:

file1
file2
<etc>

I have looked at the man page and nothing really stands out to me for removing the leading ./ in the tar process. One thing I was thinking about doing was changing the script to the following...

cd $data_dir; tar -zchvf "$target" *; cd -

but this just feels very wrong to me and I believe there is something else stupid I am missing.

I am using bash v3.2.5 just as reference.

Answer 1

If you use gnu tar you can edit the filenames on the way into the tar:

$ mkdir -p a/b
$ cd a
$ tar cf - --transform='s:^./::' . | tar tvf - 
drwxr-xr-x        0 2018-07-24 18:18 ./
drwxr-xr-x        0 2018-07-24 18:18 b/

Answer 2

Reading tar 1.15.1's documentation,released 2004-12-21, from https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/ 's download link and its included tar.info to be sure:

6.3 Reading Names from a File
[...]

--files-from=FILE NAME' `-T FILE NAME' Get names to extract or create from file FILE NAME.

If you give a single dash as a file name for '--files-from', (i.e., you specify either '--files-from=-' or '-T -'), then the file names are read from standard input.

Now for ls, part of coreutils, reading coreutil.info from coreutils-5.0 from 2003-04-02 (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/), so predating tar 1.15.1:

'-A'
'--almost-all'
List all files in directories except for '.' and '..'.

So this should work as wished (pair of parenthesis are there to forget the cd, you could probably do cd - instead or just not care):

( cd "$data_dir" && ls -A | tar -zchvf "$target_file" -T - )