Question

I am trying to tar multiple files using the find command. I want to find all the files in the directory that contain a specific string in the file name and then tar those files. The string that I am want to find in the file name is the date.

For instance, I have a file name named ulog.20120914.log

What I’m doing right now is:

DAYTWOPREV=`date +%Y%m%d --date='2 days ago'`

function archive {
    cd $1;
    if [ ! -d archive ]; then
        mkdir archive;
    fi

TMPFILE=`mktemp`;
    find . -maxdepth 1 -name "${DAYTWOPREV}*" -type f -print0  > $TMPFILE;


    TARFILE=archive/${DAYTWOPREV}$2.tar;
    if [ ! -e $TARFILE ]; then
        echo tar cfT $TARFILE /dev/null;
        tar cfT $TARFILE /dev/null;
    fi  

cat $TMPFILE | xargs -0r tar rf $TARFILE
    cat $TMPFILE | xargs -0r rm -rf
    rm -f $TMPFILE;

}

Answer 1

Assuming you have GNU tar (i.e. on Linux, not AIX, or HP-UX or …):

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | grep -z "${DAYTWOPREV}" | tar -cvf archive.tar --null -T /dev/stdin