mjhjmtu

I ran into that problem today when I wanted to tar all files and directories in a specified directory. Doing the following is not enough because hidden files (ones starting with . won't be included):

tar -czvf ~/tarfile.tar.gz /path/to/dir/*

Then I thought of the following:

find /path/to/dir/* -execdir /bin/tar -czvf ~/tarfile.tar.gz '' +

But this is not sufficient. What if execdir has reached the command lien limits and needed to re-run the same command with the rest set of files found?

So I needed an option or some way to create the tar file if it doesn't exists. If exists, append to it. Tried to find a solution to this, but couldn't. Thought of -r option but didn't work because it requires the existence of an already created tar file.

Does this mean there is no way and one has to write a mini-script to get this logic done?

Just use tar czvf ~/tarfile.tar.gz /path/to/dir/ without "*" which prevents the files starting with a "." from being included.

If you want to update an existing tarfile.tar.gz (i.e. add more files to it), you will need a small hack to update it, because tar runs into trouble updating a "gzipped" file.
This oneliner "unzips, updates and zips" the file or creates a new one.

[ -f tarfile.tar.gz ] && (gunzip tarfile.tar.gz; tar uf tarfile.tar /path/to/dir/; gzip tarfile.tar) || tar cvfz tarfile.tar.gz /path/to/dir/

The simplest option would be to use tar uf tarfile.tar /path/to/dir/ which creates the file or updates it. You will need to compress it manually afterwards (maybe copy it to a different location first).