Question

Is it possible, when making a tar + gzip through the ‘tar c …’ command, to have the relative paths will be ignored upon expanding?

For example,

tar cvf test.tgz foo ../../files/bar

And then expanding the test.tgz with

tar xvf test.tgz

gives a directory containing:

foo files/bar

I want the directory to contain the files:

foo bar

Is this possible?

Answer 1

If all the paths begin with the same initial list of directories then you can use e.g. tar cvf test.tgz -C ../.. other/dir. Beware that the shell won’t expand wildcards in pathnames “properly” however because -C asks tar to change directory.

Otherwise, the only way I’ve ever come up with is to make a temporary directory filled with appropriate symlinks and use the -h option to dereference through symlinks. Of course that won’t work if some of the files you want to store are actually symlinks themselves.