AIX

On my RedHat Linux, "man tar" says:
I have never seen that -L flag behave the way you describe on Linux. -L is documented on IBM's AIX web site but it says it is a list of files and directories. "-C/backup/test" therefore should indicate that that the current directory has a subdirectory named "-C". You seem to think that you can put command line options in your file. I don't see any language to support that. But I have no AIX to test.

/backup/test is a directory, /backup/test/test1 and /backup/test/test2 are directories as well.

The command I am using to test this will not grab any files in test1 or test2, but if I add the -R option, it will.

Right now, I'm just trying to keep it simple to resolve this issue.

The purpose of doing this is that I want to archive test1 and test2, but I do not want the path to be stored.

So, given these directories:
/backup/test/test1
/backup/test/test2

I want to archive to contain test1 and test2, not /backup/test/test1 and /backup/test/test2.

files.txt could ultimately contain 100+ different directories to archive, which is why I am trying to use the -L option instead on using -C on the command line

---------- Post updated at 11:31 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:29 AM ----------

the tar command is different between Linux and UNIX. On Linux, using a file to list the items to be archived it done with the "-T" option, but its done with "-L" on UNIX, at least AIX...