'Tar' the result of a 'find', preserving the directory structure

Question

I want to tar all the *.txt files that I get as the result of a find command, that exist in a directory having a tree structure like this:

• Directory_name
• • dir1
• • • file1.pdf
• • • file1.txt
• • dir2
• • • file2.pdf
• • • file2.txt
• • dir3
• • • file3.pdf
• • • file3.txt

(the filenames are just examples).

But I want to preserve the directory structure.

What command can give me a tar.gz file with this content?

• dir1
• • file1.txt
• dir2
• • file2.txt
• dir3
• • file3.txt

Solution

You can use xargs to feed the output of a command as arguments to another:

find . -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 tar zcvf the_tarball.tar.gz

Note here the -print0 from find and -0 from xargs work in conjunction to delimit file names correctly (so that names with spaces and such aren't a problem).

Comments

[doktor5000]

xargs is not even necessary, you can pipe the output of find directly to tar via stdin. For your example: find . -iname '*.txt' | tar zcvf the_tarball.tar.gz --files-from - Explained here: stackoverflow.com/a/9534272/4017010 and the general topic was already discussed here: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5641/…

[Kamafeather]

Hi, this worked perfectly. And thanks doktor5000 for the precision :)