tar: add all files and directories in current directory INCLUDING .svn and so on

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I try to tar.gz a directory and use

tar -czf workspace.tar.gz *

The resulting tar includes .svn directories in subdirs but NOT in the current directory (as * gets expanded to only 'visible' files before it is passed to tar

I tried to

tar -czf workspace.tar.gz . instead but then I am getting an error because '.' has changed while reading:

tar: ./workspace.tar.gz: file changed as we read it

Is there a trick so that * matches all files (including dot-prefixed) in a directory?

(using bash on Linux SLES-11 (2.6.27.19)

tar linux design-patterns bash
16 Answers

10 years later, you have an alternative to tar, illustrated with Git 2.30 (Q1 2021), which uses "git archive"(man) to produce the release tarball instead of tar.
(You don't need Git 2.30 to apply that alternative)

See commit 4813277 (11 Oct 2020), and commit 93e7031 (10 Oct 2020) by René Scharfe (rscharfe).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 63e5273, 27 Oct 2020)

Makefile: use git init/add/commit/archive for dist-doc

Signed-off-by: René Scharfe

Reduce the dependency on external tools by generating the distribution archives for HTML documentation and manpages using git(man) commands instead of tar. This gives the archive entries the same meta data as those in the dist archive for binaries.

So instead of:

tar cf ../archive.tar .

You can do using Git only:

git -C workspace init
git -C workspace add .
git -C workspace commit -m workspace
git -C workspace archive --format=tar --prefix=./ HEAD^{tree} > workspace.tar
rm -Rf workspace/.git

That was initially proposed because, as explained here, some exotic platform might have an old tar distribution with lacking options.

VonC_63090
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