Find files and tar them (with spaces)

Question

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

There could be another way to achieve what you want. Basically,

1. Use the find command to output path to whatever files you're looking for. Redirect stdout to a filename of your choosing.

2. Then tar with the -T option which allows it to take a list of file locations (the one you just created with find!)

   find . -name "*.whatever" > yourListOfFiles
   tar -cvf yourfile.tar -T yourListOfFiles
   

Try running:

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

Why not:

tar czvf backup.tar.gz *

Sure it's clever to use find and then xargs, but you're doing it the hard way.

Update: Porges has commented with a find-option that I think is a better answer than my answer, or the other one: find -print0 ... | xargs -0 ....

If you have multiple files or directories and you want to zip them into independent *.gz file you can do this. Optional -type f -atime

find -name "httpd-log*.txt" -type f -mtime +1 -exec tar -vzcf {}.gz {} \;

This will compress

httpd-log01.txt
httpd-log02.txt

to

httpd-log01.txt.gz
httpd-log02.txt.gz

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.