for each dir create a tar file

Question

I have a bunch of directories that need to be restored, but they have to first be packaged into a .tar. Is there a script that would allow me to package all 100+ directories into their own tar so dir becomes dir.tar.

So far attempt:

for i in *; do tar czf $i.tar $i; done

Answer 1

The script that you wrote will not work if you have some spaces in a directory name, because the name will be split, and also it will tar files if they exist on this level.

You can use this command to list directories not recursively:

find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d

and this one to perform a tar on each one:

find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec tar cvf {}.tar {}  \;

Answer 2

Do you have any directory names with spaces in them at that level? If not, your script will work just fine.

What I usually do is write a script with the command I want to execute echoed out:

$ for i in *
do
    echo tar czf $i.tar $i
done

Then you can look at the output and see if it's doing what you want. After you've determined that the program will work, edit the command line and remove the echo command.

Answer 3

If there are spaces in the directory names, then just put the variables inside double quotes:

for i in *
 do
     tar czf "$i.tar" "$i"
 done