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i want to tar the contents inside /some/directory/ and this directory has lots of files and other sub directories in it.
what is the actual difference between the below tar commands, i noticed the latter command contains more files in the tar archive compared to the first one.
i compared by using tar -tvf | wc -l on each archive
cd /some/directory/
tar -cvf /tmp/directory.tar *
compared to
tar -cvf /tmp/directory.tar -C /some/directory/ .
The first command will tar all files inside /some/directory recursively where the pattern * matches. These are generally all non-hidden files. If you're using bash, you need to enable the dotglob shell option with shopt -s dotglob to also match hidden files before running the command.
The second command changes the directory to /some/directory and includes the current directory . and all files including hidden files inside it. It also adds ./ as parent directory to the archive. You can see this additional folder with tar tf /tmp/directory.tar, but there is no difference to the first command on extraction (besides missing hidden files and that all files in the second archive are prefixed with the relative path ./)
*is not including files starting with a dot like.bashrcwhile.is including all files in the directory.