The following is a snippet from a script I have that tries to tar up all php files in a subdir. It tries to use the '--include' parameter but does not seem to work (output is from 'set -x' in bash)
+ find . -name '*.php'
./autoload.php
./ext/thrift_protocol/run-tests.php
./protocol/TBinaryProtocol.php
...
./transport/TTransportFactory.php
+ tar -cvjf my.tar.bz2 '--include=*.php' .
+ set +x
The find found several php files but tar does not seem to see them. If I take out the --include all files are tarred.
I know I can use find to feed a list
(find . -name '*.php' -print0 | tar -cvjf "my.tar.bz2" --null -T -), but whats wrong with the --include param?
Answer
GNU tar has a -T or --files-from option that can take a file containing a list of patterns to include. The file specified with this option can be "-" for stdin. So, you can pass an arbitrary list of files for tar to archive from stdin using -files-from -. Your example becomes:
find . -name '*.php' | tar -cvjf my.tar.bz2 --files-from -