tar on a directory mydir will archive hidden files and hidden subdirectories, but tar from within mydir with a * wildcard will not. Is this a longstanding and known inconsistency or bug?
Edit (additional information): tar from within mydir with a wildcard will not "see" nor archive hidden files and hidden subdirectories in the immediate directory. However, in the non-hidden subdirectories of mydir hidden files and hidden subdirectories will be archived.
With wildcard it will not work. You have to specify . (current directory) if you mean full directory including hidden files. You can do
tar -cvpzf test.tgz .
You can use:
tar -cvpzf test.tgz * .??*
But, this works only for hidden files with names > 2 (to prevent '.' and '..')
The answer is that the * wildcard is handled by the shell and it just does not expand to things that start with a dot. The other wildcard ? also does not expand to things that start with a dot. Thanks to Keith for pointing out it is the shell that does the expansion and so it has nothing to do with tar.
If you use shopt -s dotglob then expansion will include things like .filename. Thanks to Andy.
Use shopt -u dotglob to turn it off.
Switching the dotglob option does not change ls itself. Rather it just changes expansion behaviour as exhibited in something like ls *.
Edit: My recommendations are in a comment below.
The shell expands the wildcards so tar doesn't even see it. You have to add them explicitly if you want to do that. (.*). However, it's most common to tar a single directory so that when you untar it all goes to the same place.
You can compress all the files / folders in your current directory (including .hidden) by using:
tar -zcvf compressed.tgz `ls -A -1`
The last argument are the folders you want to compress. If you pass it ls -A -1 , you are passing it all folders in your current directory but . and .. .
When it comes to subdirectories, .hidden files are already included in the compression by default.
shopt -s dotglob
this will make the
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4572973/archiving-ubuntu-tar-hidden-directories