6.3 Reading Names from a File

Instead of giving the names of files or archive members on the command line, you can put the names into a file, and then use the ‘--files-from=file-of-names’ (‘-T file-of-names’) option to tar. Give the name of the file which contains the list of files to include as the argument to ‘--files-from’. In the list, the file names should be separated by newlines. You will frequently use this option when you have generated the list of files to archive with the find utility.

‘--files-from=file-name’

‘-T file-name’

Get names to extract or create from file file-name.

If you give a single dash as a file name for ‘--files-from’, (i.e., you specify either --files-from=- or -T -), then the file names are read from standard input.

Unless you are running tar with ‘--create’, you can not use both --files-from=- and --file=- (-f -) in the same command.

Any number of ‘-T’ options can be given in the command line.

The following example shows how to use find to generate a list of files smaller than 400K in length and put that list into a file called ‘small-files’. You can then use the ‘-T’ option to tar to specify the files from that file, ‘small-files’, to create the archive ‘little.tgz’. (The ‘-z’ option to tar compresses the archive with gzip; see section Creating and Reading Compressed Archives for more information.)

$ find . -size -400 -print > small-files
$ tar -c -v -z -T small-files -f little.tgz

In the file list given by ‘-T’ option, any file name beginning with ‘-’ character is considered a tar option and is processed accordingly(14). For example, the common use of this feature is to change to another directory by specifying ‘-C’ option:

$ cat list
-C/etc
passwd
hosts
-C/lib
libc.a
$ tar -c -f foo.tar --files-from list

In this example, tar will first switch to ‘/etc’ directory and add files ‘passwd’ and ‘hosts’ to the archive. Then it will change to ‘/lib’ directory and will archive the file ‘libc.a’. Thus, the resulting archive ‘foo.tar’ will contain:

$ tar tf foo.tar
passwd
hosts
libc.a

If you happen to have a file whose name starts with ‘-’, precede it with ‘--add-file’ option to prevent it from being recognized as an option. For example: --add-file=--my-file.

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