How do I tar a directory of files and folders without including the directory itself?

Question

I typically do:

tar -czvf my_directory.tar.gz my_directory

What if I just want to include everything (including any hidden system files) in my_

Answer 1

This Answer should work in most situations. Notice however how the filenames are stored in the tar file as, for example, ./file1 rather than just file1. I found that this caused problems when using this method to manipulate tarballs used as package files in BuildRoot.

One solution is to use some Bash globs to list all files except for .. like this:

tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz .[^.]* ..?* *

This is a trick I learnt from this answer.

Now tar will return an error if there are no files matching ..?* or .[^.]* , but it will still work. If the error is a problem (you are checking for success in a script), this works:

shopt -s nullglob
tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz .[^.]* ..?* *
shopt -u nullglob

Though now we are messing with shell options, we might decide that it is neater to have * match hidden files:

shopt -s dotglob
tar -C my_dir -zcvf my_dir.tar.gz *
shopt -u dotglob

This might not work where your shell globs * in the current directory, so alternatively, use:

shopt -s dotglob
cd my_dir
tar -zcvf ../my_dir.tar.gz *
cd ..
shopt -u dotglob