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I want to find all .c files in current directory and subdirectories and tar them. I try to use the following way to achieve this goal but when i unzip files, the files in different folders. I don't want to include directory when I tar the file.
The script should exclude all other files and should not maintain the directory structure for these .c files.
find . -name '*.c' | xargs tar -rf allcfiles.tar
.
If you have GNUtar (which is common on Linux) then you can use the --transform option.
For example, with your current command we can see there's directories:
$ find . -name '*.c' | xargs tar -rf allcfiles.tar
$ tar tf allcfiles.tar
./b.c
./d/e.c
./a.c
With a transform we can avoid this:
$ find . -name '*.c' | xargs tar --transform='s!.*/!!' -rf allcfiles.tar
$ tar tf allcfiles.tar
b.c
e.c
a.c
The expression inside the --transform is a simple sed expression. This one just strips off all directory components.
TAR implementation, this gives error messages because the archive does not exist at the beginning. The original UNIX TAR does not deal with this at all, because it never creates an archive in replace mode. star warns because the archive at the beginning does not have a correct EOF marker. I recommend a modern tar like star with built in find and with pax like path substitution and not to use the replace mode.
find ... -print0 and xargs -0. (Sure, newlines in real-world file names are extremely unlikely, but...).
If your find implementation supports the -execdir option, you can tar the files without their directories like this:
find . -name '*.c' -type f -execdir tar rf $PWD/mytar.tar {} +
Just make sure the path to the tar file is an absolute path.
Here is a method that works using only POSIX compliant commands:
find . -name '*.c' | pax -w -s ',.*/,,' > allcfiles.tar
If you like to use tar rf archive ..., you need to start with a correct empty archive at the beginning, since a real tar does not create the archive when in replace mode. To achieve this, you could first run this command to create an empty TAR archive:
printf "\000"| dd ibs=10k conv=sync > allcfiles.tar
By the way, I prefer this command:
star cf allcfiles.tar -s ',*/,,' -find . -name '*.c'
since this is the fastest method because star uses libfind and this needs to call stat() only once per file as the stat data from libfind is used by star to set up the file meta data in the archive.
