8

I want to tar all the *.txt files that I get as the result of a find command, that exist in a directory having a tree structure like this:

  • Directory_name
    • dir1
      • file1.pdf
      • file1.txt
    • dir2
      • file2.pdf
      • file2.txt
    • dir3
      • file3.pdf
      • file3.txt

(the filenames are just examples).

But I want to preserve the directory structure.

What command can give me a tar.gz file with this content?

  • dir1
    • file1.txt
  • dir2
    • file2.txt
  • dir3
    • file3.txt
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1 Answer 1

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12

You can use xargs to feed the output of a command as arguments to another:

find . -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 tar zcvf the_tarball.tar.gz

Note here the -print0 from find and -0 from xargs work in conjunction to delimit file names correctly (so that names with spaces and such aren't a problem).

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  • 8
    xargs is not even necessary, you can pipe the output of find directly to tar via stdin. For your example: find . -iname '*.txt' | tar zcvf the_tarball.tar.gz --files-from - Explained here: stackoverflow.com/a/9534272/4017010 and the general topic was already discussed here: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5641/… Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 21:28
  • Hi, this worked perfectly. And thanks doktor5000 for the precision :) Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 9:48

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