Making archive from files with same names in different directories

Question

Hi,

I have some files with same names but under different directories. For example, path1/filea, path1/fileb, path2/filea, path2/fileb,....

What is the best way to make the files into an archive? Under these directories, there are many other files under these directories that I don't want to make into the archive. Off the top of my head, I think of using Bash, probably ar, tar and other commands, but am not sure how exactly to do it.

Renaming the files seems to make the file names a little complicated. I tend to keep the directory structure inside the archive. Or I might be wrong. Other ideas are welcome!

Thanks and regards!

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EDIT:

Examples would be really nice!

Answer 1

you can use tar with --exclude PATTERN option. See the man page for more. To exclude files, you can see this page for examples.

Answer 2

What I have used to make a tar ball for the files with same name in different directories is

$find <path> -name <filename> -exec tar -rvf data.tar '{}' \;

i.e. tar [-]r --append

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

You may give the find command multiple directories to search through.

# example: create archive of .tex files
find -x LaTeX-files1 LaTeX-files2 -name "*.tex" -print0 | tar --null --no-recursion -uf LaTeXfiles.tar --files-from -