How to tar directory and then remove originals including the directory?

Solution 1:

You are missing the part which says the --remove-files option removes files after adding them to the archive.

You could follow the archive and file-removal operation with a command like,

find /path/to/be/archived/ -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

Update: You may be interested in reading this short Debian discussion on,
Bug 424692: --remove-files complains that directories "changed as we read it".

Solution 2:

Since the --remove-files option only removes files, you could try

tar -cvf files.tar my_directory && rm -R my_directory

so that the directory is removed only if the tar returns an exit status of 0

Solution 3:

Have you tried to put --remove-files directive after archive name? It works for me.

tar -cvf files.tar --remove-files my_directory

Solution 4:

source={directory argument}

e.g.

source={FULL ABSOLUTE PATH}/my_directory

parent={parent directory of argument}

e.g.

parent={ABSOLUTE PATH of 'my_directory'/

logFile={path to a run log that captures status messages}

Then you could execute something along the lines of:

cd ${parent}

tar cvf Tar_File.`date%Y%M%D_%H%M%S` ${source}

if [ $? != 0 ]

then

 echo "Backup FAILED for ${source} at `date` >> ${logFile}

else

 echo "Backup SUCCESS for ${source} at `date` >> ${logFile}

 rm -rf ${source}

fi

Solution 5:

This was probably a bug.

Also the word "file" is ambigous in this case. But because this is a command line switch I would it expect to mean also directories, because in unix/lnux everything is a file, also a directory. (The other interpretation is of course also valid, but It makes no sense to keep directories in such a case. I would consider it unexpected and confusing behavior.)

But I have found that in gnu tar on some distributions gnu tar actually removes the directory tree. Another indication that keeping the tree was a bug. Or at least some workaround until they fixed it.

This is what I tried out on an ubuntu 10.04 console:

mit:/var/tmp$ mkdir tree1                                                                                               
mit:/var/tmp$ mkdir tree1/sub1                                                                                          
mit:/var/tmp$ > tree1/sub1/file1                                                                                        

mit:/var/tmp$ ls -la                                                                                                    
drwxrwxrwt  4 root root 4096 2011-11-14 15:40 .                                                                              
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 2011-02-25 03:15 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 mit  mit  4096 2011-11-14 15:40 tree1

mit:/var/tmp$ tar -czf tree1.tar.gz tree1/ --remove-files

# AS YOU CAN SEE THE TREE IS GONE NOW:

mit:/var/tmp$ ls -la
drwxrwxrwt  3 root root 4096 2011-11-14 15:41 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 2011-02-25 03:15 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 mit   mit    159 2011-11-14 15:41 tree1.tar.gz                                                                   


mit:/var/tmp$ tar --version                                                                                             
tar (GNU tar) 1.22                                                                                                           
Copyright © 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

If you want to see it on your machine, paste this into a console at your own risk:

tar --version                                                                                             
cd /var/tmp
mkdir -p tree1/sub1                                                                                          
> tree1/sub1/file1                                                                                        
tar -czf tree1.tar.gz tree1/ --remove-files
ls -la