archiving hidden directories with tar

tar on a directory mydir will archive hidden files and hidden subdirectories, but tar from within mydir with a * wildcard will not. Is this a known inconsistency or bug?

Edit: Additional information. tar from within mydir with a * wildcard will not "see" nor archive hidden files and hidden subdirectories in the immediate directory. However, in the non-hidden subdirectories of mydir hidden files and hidden subdirectories will be archived. In other words, deeper in the directory tree the hidden objects will be archived.

Solution 1:

With wildcard it will not work. You have to specify . (current directory) if you mean full directory including hidden files. You can do

tar -cvpzf test.tgz .

Solution 2:

The answer is that the * wildcard is handled by the shell and it just does not expand to things that start with a dot. The other wildcard ? also does not expand to things that start with a dot. Thanks to Keith for pointing out it is the shell that does the expansion and so it has nothing to do with tar.

If you use shopt -s dotglob then expansion will include things like .filename. Thanks to Andy.

Use shopt -u dotglob to turn it off.

Switching the dotglob option does not change ls itself. Rather it just changes expansion behaviour as exhibited in something like ls *.

Edit: My recommendations are in a comment below.

Solution 3:

You can use:

tar -cvpzf test.tgz * .??*

But, this works only for hidden files with names > 2 (to prevent '.' and '..')

Solution 4:

You can compress all the files / folders in your current directory (including .hidden) by using:

tar -zcvf compressed.tgz `ls -A -1`

The last argument are the folders you want to compress. If you pass it ls -A -1 , you are passing it all folders in your current directory but . and .. . When it comes to subdirectories, .hidden files are already included in the compression by default.