Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm having an issue extracting my tar.gz file. I am trying to compress all directories based on their last modified date (particularly their last modified month), and move them to a different directory by month. When I run my script everything seems to work ok and my compressed file gets moved to the desired location directory. The issue is when I check to see what directories got compressed and moved, by extracting the files, the directory path appears as well. For example I'm compressing a directory named "dir" with the path name /home/username/directory/dir. When I compress "dir" then move and extract it, it extracts both the contents of dir (which is what I wanted) but also /home/user/directory.

How do I fix this?

My script is below

Code:

cd /home/user/directory
MONTH=`find . -type d -newermt 2012-07-01 ! -newermt 2012-07-31`

for F in ${MONTH}
do
        tar -zcvf dir.tar.gz /home/user/directory/${F}
done

mv dir.tar.gz /home/user/newdirectory/month

Try adding ! -name '.' to your find statement.

If I understood you correctly, your problem is that the members of the archive are using an absolute path and you want them to be relative, so that when you extract them the newly-created pathnames are relative to the current working directory at the time of extraction.

If that's the case, you probably want tar to switch working directory before creating the archive:

Code:

tar -zcvf dir.tar.gz -C /home/user/directory "${F}"

Regards,
Alister

It works, thanks a lot.

I understood that the home directory "." was being compressed also and it was only sub directories of this that were wanted. As I suggested this can be done with excluding the path using ! -name option, or -mindepth 1 and perhaps also -maxdepth 1 if you only want directories at the top level.