I need to create a tar file that contains a number of .res files, and I need the tarball to contain the path to these .res files as well. The problem is that I want to create the tarball from a 3-deep directory tree.

- The base directory contains 24 directories
- Each of those 24 directories contain 33 directories
- Inside each of those 24*33 directories is a .res file that I want to capture in my tarball (there are also many other files that I do not wish to capture)

So I cd to the base directory and type:

But I get some error message saying that the tree is too deep or something (this is on my machine at work...I cant seem to reproduce the same error on my own machine at home). Has anyone encountered this problem and know of an efficient way around it? (I really do need to have just a single tarball with these files, not multiple tarballs). Thanks

*/*/* is not a good approach, not even sure if that will work.

Use find with the exec option, it also has a max depth option.

cd <directory>
find . -type f -name *.res -maxdepth 3 -exec tar cvf my_results.tar {} \;

Exclude the -exec portion off to have it print off the findings to verify before tarballing the files. you could also just do a find without the exec and pipe it to xargs to tarball it.

find . -type f -name *.res -maxdepth 3 | xargs tar cvf my_results.tar

Awesome, thanks that did the trick! I need to find the time to get more intimate with my shell one of these days.