I have not found anything obvious in the tar docs that explain this, but I was wondering if any pros know how to do any of the following:

Let's say I want to tar a directory, but only include files not folders. Is there a simple way to do this?

What if I want to tar everything in a directory, but exclude one particular file or folder (or a few)?

I may think of some more questions, but these are most pressing to me.

There's the pretty clear --exclude option that you can look up for the second question

In answer to the first, I suspect the answer is not easily, but let me see if I understand what you mean. If this is your structure

you want to tar file_1, file_2 and file_3 (but not as directory/file_3)

What you'd need to do is some form of loop through and sub-directories using -C and --no-recursion while concatonating files to the tarball. However if file_3 was also called file_2 I think you'll have some issues.

If you mean that you just want to tar file_1 and file_2, then --no-recursion should get you there.


Note that tar wants to include the path from where you start unless you use -C

You could use find -type f to present the file list and use tar's ability to read the file list from STDIN.