Make tar archive only files without directories (equivalent of zip -D -j)

Question

I want to tar (and gzip) files without directories and do not store directory paths. I want only flat files in my archive.

For example if I'll do something like this:

tar -czf archive.tgz /home/another/path/*

Then I'll have files with paths in my archive:

home/another/path/file1
home/another/path/file2
home/another/path/file3

But I'd like to have only this:

file1
file2
file3

This is an equivalent of zip's zip -D -j command.

For simplicity's sake lets assume that there are no subdirectories inside /home/another/path/ - it contains only files.

I tried wit -C option but it didn't seem to work. With command like this:

tar -C /home/another/path/ -czf archive.tgz *

The tar was trying to archive files in current dir instead of the dir passed to -C. I'm using (GNU tar) 1.19.

Answer 1

Try the following:

find . -type f -printf "%h\n%f\n" | xargs -L 2 tar -rf /tmp/files.tar -C 

or some variation depending on your needs. One should consider security when executing this command. And if you're willing to have "./" before the filename, the following might be a little more secure:

find -type f -execdir tar -rf /tmp/files.tar {} \;

or

find -type f -execdir tar -rf /tmp/files.tar {} +