Find files and tar them (with spaces)

Question

Alright, so simple problem here. I'm working on a simple back up code. It works fine except if the files have spaces in them. This is how I'm finding files and adding them to a tar archive:

find . -type f | xargs tar -czvf backup.tar.gz 

The problem is when the file has a space in the name because tar thinks that it's a folder. Basically is there a way I can add quotes around the results from find? Or a different way to fix this?

Answer 1

Use this:

find . -type f -print0 | tar -czvf backup.tar.gz --null -T -

It will:

• deal with files with spaces, newlines, leading dashes, and other funniness
• handle an unlimited number of files
• won't repeatedly overwrite your backup.tar.gz like using tar -c with xargs will do when you have a large number of files

Also see:

• GNU tar manual
• How can I build a tar from stdin?, search for null

Answer 2

There could be another way to achieve what you want. Basically,

1. Use the find command to output path to whatever files you're looking for. Redirect stdout to a filename of your choosing.

2. Then tar with the -T option which allows it to take a list of file locations (the one you just created with find!)

   find . -name "*.whatever" > yourListOfFiles
   tar -cvf yourfile.tar -T yourListOfFiles