Create a "relative path" tar-archive?
 

For lack of actually knowing what I'm asking, let me explain.

When I do

When I go into the archive I see that it has preserved the absolute path of the directory structure. The archive actually contains
/some/path/to/a/dir and then files.

How can I make is so the root of the archive is the actual directory I'm archiving.

I suppose another way of saying this would be: How can I not archive the parent directories.

use relative paths when creating it

How would I do that if this command is going to be run from a cron script?

write a script and have cron call the script

You can also use the -C option to first change to the directory, then specify the files.

Such as "tar -C /some/path/to/a/dir -zcf <full path to>/archive.tar.gz ."

If you wanted the "dir" to be part of the archive, then use "tar -C /some/path/to/a/ -zcf <full path to>/archive.tar.gz dir"

Thank you. That's what I needed!