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tar cannot read in file data from stdin for creating an archive, since then tar will have no way of knowing what a file is - where one begins or ends, what its path and metadata is.
Now, if you want a single file or folder from the “tar” file, you need to use the name of the “tar” file and the path to a single file in it. So, we have used the “tar” command with the “-xvf” option, the name of the “tar” file, and the path of a file to be extracted from it as below.
Yes:
tar -cvf allfiles.tar -T mylist.txt
Assuming GNU tar (as this is Linux), the -T or --files-from option is what you want.
You can also pipe in the file names which might be useful:
find /path/to/files -name \*.txt | tar -cvf allfiles.tar -T -
Some versions of tar, for example, the default versions on HP-UX (I tested 11.11 and 11.31), do not include a command line option to specify a file list, so a decent work-around is to do this:
tar cvf allfiles.tar $(cat mylist.txt)
On Solaris, you can use the option -I to read the filenames that you would normally state on the command line from a file. In contrast to the command line, this can create tar archives with hundreds of thousands of files (just did that).
So the example would read
tar -cvf allfiles.tar -I mylist.txt
For me on AIX, it worked as follows:
tar -L List.txt -cvf BKP.tar
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