CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxtar
user1876422
user1876422

Reputation: 457

How to use tar to archive files from different directories without directory structure

I have several hundred to thousand files in different subdirectories which all reside in one parent directory, e.g.

/home/dir1/file1
/home/dir2/file2
/home/dir3/file3
...
/home/dir10000/file10000

How can I use tar so my tar archive looks like this?

file1
file2
file3

I can ensure that the file names are unique. I do not want to include the original directory structure.

Thanks for you help folks!

Upvotes: 6

Views: 12016

Answers (4)

trs
trs

Reputation: 1127

The one way to solve this without cating or |ing to other programs:

tar --transform 's,.*/,,g' -cvf mytarfile.tar /path/to/parent_dir

# --transform accepts a regular expression similar to sed.
#   I used "," as a delimiter so I don't have to escape "/"
#   This will replace anything up to the final "/" with ""
#   /path/to/parent_dir/sub1/sub2/subsubsub/file.txt -> file.txt
#   /path/to/parent_dir/file2.txt -> file2.txt

Unlike Aaron Okano implies, there is no need to pipe to xargs if you have a long list of files within a single / few parent directories that you can specify on the command line.

Upvotes: 6

Aaron Okano
Aaron Okano

Reputation: 2343

GNU tar will take a transform option, which is just a sed expression that transforms the file name in the archive. You will also probably want to pipe to xargs if your list of files is very large.

cat filelist | xargs tar -rvf archive.tar --transform='s|.*/||g'

Keep in mind that this is appending to a tar archive (it will create one if it does not exist yet) so you will want to delete the archive if it already exists before running that command.

Upvotes: 3

Basile Starynkevitch
Basile Starynkevitch

Reputation: 1

A possible solution might be to use the ordinary tar command (spitting on its stdout) and then to pipe the archive into tardy, probably with its -No_Directories option, i.e.

 tar cf - /home/dir?/ | tardy -No-Directories > yourbig.tar

However, I am not sure it is a good idea. Having a tar ball which is extracting into hundred of thousands of files in the same directory is not a good idea (some filesystems behave badly with that).

Upvotes: 2

will lamb
will lamb

Reputation: 17

Open the command line and type

tar -cvf NAME.tar /home/dir1/file1 /home/dir1/file2 /home/dir1/file3

Hope this helps :)

Upvotes: -3

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