Create archive with hidden files and folders creates a . root entry

Question

I am trying to archive a project folder with hidden files and folders, and I get one with a root entry of .. It's annoying. Typically :

tar -czf $ARCHIVE_NAME -C $DIR .

will create an archive like

./package.json
./.git
./.gitignore
.
.
.

where I'd like the root of the archive to be the actual files and folders, not having a . entry. Like

package.json
.git
.gitignore
.
.
.

How do I do that?

* Edit *

The below image may be helpful clarifying this question.

• On the left, an archive created with the GUI tool of the project (from two days ago).
• On the right, an archive created with the above tar command.

Notice the "Location" bar; the archive on the right should be /, and not /./.

Answer 1

./ means the current directory. Your two listings are identical.

Having ./ in front of the file when listing the archive helps to handle files with a special name. A file name -file will be displayed as ./-file allowing to be processed by a second tool.

Answer 2

Changing your command from

tar -czf $ARCHIVE_NAME -C $DIR .

to

tar -czf $ARCHIVE_NAME -C $DIR ./*

should do the trick. This way, you're not saying "Add the directory . to the archive" but instead "Add all these files in the directory . to the archive".

Answer 3

This command will tar files in the current directory without the leading ./:

tar cf /some/tarfile.tar *

Of course, it won't include filenames starting with a period, which probably isn't what you want. You can add additional wildcards to catch those:

tar cf /some/tarfile.tar * .[a-zA-Z]*

But this isn't a general-purpose solution; you have to know what filenames are in the directory so that you can craft appropriate wildcards.

GNU tar--which is what most Linux distros use--has a feature to transform filenames using sed expressions. This will remove the ./ from files while creating the archive:

tar cf /some/tarfile.tar --transform 's,^\./,,' .

The resulting archive will still have an entry in it for the "." directory itself.

Some versions of tar can read the names of the files to be tarred from a file. You can exploit that feature to do this:

ls -a | egrep -v '^\.\.?$' | tar cf - -T /dev/stdin

This pipeline constructs a list of all files in the current directory, removes the . and .. entries, and pipes the rest of the names to tar. tar makes the archive from filenames read from /dev/stdin (its standard input).