tarring find results on hp-ux

Question

$ find /tmp/a1
/tmp/a1
/tmp/a1/b2
/tmp/a1/b1
/tmp/a1/b1/x1

simply trying

find /tmp/a1 -exec tar -cvf dirall.tar {} \;

simply doesn't work

any help

Answer 1

The command specified for -exec is run once for each file found. As such, you're recreating dirall.tar every time the command is run. Instead, you should pipe the output of find to tar.

find /tmp/a1 -print0 | tar --null -T- -cvf dirall.tar

Note that if you're simply using find to get a list of all the files under /tmp/a1 and not doing any sort of filtering, it's much simpler to use tar -cvf dirall.tar /tmp/a1.

Answer 2

I'd think something like "find /tmp/a1 | xargs tar cvf foo.tar" would work. But make sure you have backups first!

Answer 3

Does hpux have cpio ? That will take a list of files on stdin and some versions will write output in tar format.

Answer 4

You're one character away from the solution. Just replace the -c with -r to put tar into append mode so that each time find invokes it, it'll tack on one more file:

rm -f dirall.tar
find /tmp/a1 -exec tar -rvf dirall.tar {} \;