Hi, when I execute this command "tar -zcf /home/martin/documents.tar.gz /home/martin/Documents" all files in the compressed archive gets the full path, so whem decompressing i get something like this

/home/martin/documents/home/martin/Documents/archive1.txt
/home/martin/documents/home/martin/Documents/archive2.txt
/home/martin/documents/home/martin/Documents/archive3.txt

I really want to have it this way, without the full path
/home/martin/documents/archive1.txt
/home/martin/documents/archive2.txt
/home/martin/documents/archive3.txt

Wich parameter i am missing?


Thanks in advise!

Just cd into /home/martin before you create the tar archive and then archive ./.

or you can use the -C parameter which does the same thing.

Greetingz!

Not sure if you're just trying to tar up "martin's" home directory, or every user's home directory, so I'm going to suggest the following;

If you want to tar just martin's home directory;
cd /home/martin

That will give you a directory structure like
./Documents/archive1.txt
./Documents/archive2.txt
./Documents/archive3.txt

However, my all-time favorite is the "-C" option of tar (that's a capital C, not lowercase). Downside is this isn't available on every single flavor of UNIX (like Solaris, HP-UX & AIX). So check your tar man page.

It would basically look like this then;

tar -zcf /home/martin/documents.tar.gz -C /home/martin/Documents .

This will give you a directory structure that looks just like above (basically, just like if tar was ran from inside the directory specified with -C)

./Documents/archive1.txt
./Documents/archive2.txt
./Documents/archive3.txt

2 members found this post helpful.

Hi the -C with th . at the end did the trick.

Thanks a lot!

Please mark as SOLVED once you have a solution.

I want to add a directory to tar by it's name and absolute path. Please remember I want to add directory itself and not just it's contents.

eg - I am running above code but system returns
"tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information."

If I run then the contents of directory_to_add will be added and not the directory itself.

Is there any solution to add the directory itself by using absolute path.

I am making a script in PHP but I found no solution with PHP inbuilt class PharData

Please help. Thanks in advance.