Find files and tar them (with spaces)

Question

Alright, so simple problem here. I\'m working on a simple back up code. It works fine except if the files have spaces in them. This is how I\'m finding files and adding th

Answer 1

Would add a comment to @Steve Kehlet post but need 50 rep (RIP).

For anyone that has found this post through numerous googling, I found a way to not only find specific files given a time range, but also NOT include the relative paths OR whitespaces that would cause tarring errors. (THANK YOU SO MUCH STEVE.)

find . -name "*.pdf" -type f -mtime 0 -printf "%f\0" | tar -czvf /dir/zip.tar.gz --null -T -

1. . relative directory

2. -name "*.pdf" look for pdfs (or any file type)

3. -type f type to look for is a file

4. -mtime 0 look for files created in last 24 hours

5. -printf "%f\0" Regular -print0 OR -printf "%f" did NOT work for me. From man pages:

This quoting is performed in the same way as for GNU ls. This is not the same quoting mechanism as the one used for -ls and -fls. If you are able to decide what format to use for the output of find then it is normally better to use '\0' as a terminator than to use newline, as file names can contain white space and newline characters.

6. -czvf create archive, filter the archive through gzip , verbosely list files processed, archive name

Edit 2019-08-14: I would like to add, that I was also able to use essentially use the same command in my comment, just using tar itself:

tar -czvf /archiveDir/test.tar.gz --newer-mtime=0 --ignore-failed-read *.pdf

Needed --ignore-failed-read in-case there were no new PDFs for today.

Answer 2

Use this:

find . -type f -print0 | tar -czvf backup.tar.gz --null -T -

It will:

• deal with files with spaces, newlines, leading dashes, and other funniness
• handle an unlimited number of files
• won't repeatedly overwrite your backup.tar.gz like using tar -c with xargs will do when you have a large number of files

Also see:

• GNU tar manual
• How can I build a tar from stdin?, search for null

Answer 3

Try running:

    find . -type f | xargs -d "\n" tar -czvf backup.tar.gz 

Answer 4

Another solution as seen here:

find var/log/ -iname "anaconda.*" -exec tar -cvzf file.tar.gz {} +