How do I exclude absolute paths for tar?

Question

I am running a PHP script that gets me the absolute paths of files I want to tar up. This is the syntax I have:

tar -cf tarname.tar -C /www/path/path/file1.txt /         


        

Answer 1

If you don't know how many components are in the path, you could try this:

DIR_TO_PACK=/www/path/
cd $DIR_TO_PACK/..
tar -cf tarname.tar $(basename $DIR_TO_PACK)