Is it possible to tar only sub directories excluding other files in the folder?

Question

For example, suppose A/B/C is the main directory. Under the C directory, I will have sub-directories and files. But I want to tar only the directories with its own name as below

If the directories under c are Test1 Test2 - I want them as Test1.tar Test2.tar

This is on a Linux machine.

Answer 1

You can tell tar not to recurse into its arguments, and then use find to provide it with every directory as an argument. So, something like this:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 tar --no-recursion -cf your_tree.tar

The -print0 and -0 are to avoid problems with directories that have spaces and other special characters in their name.

As pointed out in comments below, if you have a lot of directories then the command line would become too big and tar would end up being invoked multiple times. In that case you could instead read the arguments using --files-from:

find . -type d -print0 | tar --null --no-recursion --files-from - -cf your_tree.tar

Edit:

The above was written before the OP clarified that they wanted a set of tar files in the top level directory. I think the above technique can still be used to achieve this. For example:

$ mkdir -vp tree/a/b/c tree/foo/bar/baz                                                                                 
mkdir: created directory ‘tree’
mkdir: created directory ‘tree/a’
mkdir: created directory ‘tree/a/b’
mkdir: created directory ‘tree/a/b/c’
mkdir: created directory ‘tree/foo’
mkdir: created directory ‘tree/foo/bar’
mkdir: created directory ‘tree/foo/bar/baz’
$ touch tree/foo/an_unwanted_file
$ cd tree
/var/tmp/tree
$ for dir in $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d); do if [ "$dir" != "." ]; then find "$dir" -type d -print0 | tar --null --no-recursion --files-from - -cvf "${dir}.tar"; fi; done
./a/
./a/b/
./a/b/c/
./foo/
./foo/bar/
./foo/bar/baz/
$ tar tvf foo.tar                                                                                                       
drwxr-xr-x andy/andy         0 2018-11-29 12:30 ./foo/
drwxr-xr-x andy/andy         0 2018-11-29 12:30 ./foo/bar/
drwxr-xr-x andy/andy         0 2018-11-29 12:30 ./foo/bar/baz/
$ tree
.
├── a
│   └── b
│       └── c
├── a.tar
├── foo
│   ├── an_unwanted_file
│   └── bar
│       └── baz
└── foo.tar

Answer 2

for dir in A/B/C/*/; do
    name=$(basename "$dir")
    tar -cv -f "$name.tar" -C A/B/C "$name"
done

This would create an archive for each individual (non-hidden) subdirectory under A/B/C. The archives would be created in the current directory.

The -C option makes tar set the working directory for the following files ($name).

You could use -C "$(dirname "$dir")" in place of -C A/B/C for slightly more generic code.

---

To create the archives under the C subdirectory

( cd A/B/C &&
  for dir in */; do
      tar -cv -f "${dir%/}.tar" "$dir"
  done )

The subshell around the whole command prevents the working directory from being changed in the rest of the shell/script, and ${dir%/} removes the trailing slash at the end of the value in $dir.

Unfortunately, the -C option does not affect the working directory for the archive file specified by -f, otherwise we could just have moved the -C bit before the -f option.

Alternatively, as a variant of the first loop:

for dir in A/B/C/*/; do
    name=$( basename "$dir" )
    ( cd "$( dirname "$dir" )" && tar -cv -f "$name.tar" "$name" )
done

Answer 3

I recommend to use star (I am the author of starwhich is the oldest free tar implementation):

star cf file.tar -find . -type d

This works for any number of names in the tar file since star uses libfind-