Find files and tar them (with spaces)

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?

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

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
   

Try running:

    find . -type f | xargs -d "\n" tar -czvf backup.tar.gz 

Why not:

tar czvf backup.tar.gz *

Sure it's clever to use find and then xargs, but you're doing it the hard way.

Update: Porges has commented with a find-option that I think is a better answer than my answer, or the other one: find -print0 ... | xargs -0 ....

If you have multiple files or directories and you want to zip them into independent *.gz file you can do this. Optional -type f -atime

find -name "httpd-log*.txt" -type f -mtime +1 -exec tar -vzcf {}.gz {} \;

This will compress

httpd-log01.txt
httpd-log02.txt

to

httpd-log01.txt.gz
httpd-log02.txt.gz