command to find and tar files

[PKS_1]

Hi

I am looking for a one liner which finds all files starting with string "back" and then tars it.

[Pete Randall]

Something like "find /startdir -name "start*" |tar"?


Pete

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

You could do:

# cd /path && tar -cvf /tmp/myarchive $(find . -type f -name "*back*)

Regards!

...JRF...

[Duncan Edmonstone]

JRFs option will work, but will start to run into problems when the number of files exceeeds the limits of the command line (in terms of number of arguments and argument length). tar isn't that flexible in this situation, but pax can be persuaded to read the files to archive from stdin as follows:

Backup everything in /usr that starts with "pass":

find /usr -name "pass*" | pax -wf /tmp/mypassarchive.pax

cpio would do the trick as well...

HTH

Duncan

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] pax can be persuaded to read the
> files to archive from stdin [...]

GNU "tar" has an option for that, too.

[Suraj K Sankari]

Hi,

As everybody said here one more example
from where you want to search from root "/" or some specific directiory from root "/" give the following command.

#find / -xdev -name back* | tar -xvf back.tar

for other location suppose /home then do like this

#find /home -xdev -name back* | tar -xvf back.tar

with cpio find from current directiory

#find . -print -depth |cpio -ov >tree.cpio

This will retrieve the files archived in the file directory.

#cpio -idv < tree.cpio

Suraj

[Laurent Menase]

made on the thumb without testing it
find . -type f | while read a
do
b="$( dd bs=4 count=1 if=$a 2>/dev/null |vis)"
if [ "$b" = "back" ]
then
echo $a
fi
done| xargs tar cvf /tmp/mytar.tar

[Laurent Menase]

or an other way more funny/elegant:

myM=/tmp/m$$
echo "0\tstring\tback\tmybackfile >$myM

find . -type f | xargs file -m $myM| grep "\tmybackfile" |cut -d : -f | xargs tar cvf /tmp/mytarfile.tar


I used "file" to check the beginning of each file
defining a magic entry

[Laurent Menase]

Just a typo: in cut option,
find . -type f | xargs file -m $myM| grep "\tmybackfile" |cut -d : -f 1 | xargs tar cvf /tmp/mytarfile.tar

[Dennis Handly]

>Duncan: find /usr -name "pass*" | pax -wf /tmp/mypassarchive.pax

Or you can use .tar: ... | pax -wf /tmp/mypassarchive.tar

>Suraj: find / -xdev -name back* | tar -xvf back.tar

As mentioned, this won't work without gnu tar or pax.