SysAdmin Adventures » directories http://blog.tpa.me.uk Tech notes from a Systems Administrator Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:09:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Tarring up JUST the dotfiles http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/tarring-up-just-the-dotfiles/ http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/tarring-up-just-the-dotfiles/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:26:31 +0000 Zordrak http://blog.tpa.me.uk/?p=210 Want to tar up only the dotfiles (hidden files/dirs) in your home directory?

ls -A | egrep '^\.' | tar -cvJf filename.tar.xz -T -

or (thanks to mosk0bit)

tar -cvJf filename.tar.xz .??*

The astute will notice the “J” and the “xz”. J tells tar to compress with xz compression (formerly lzma) which is significantly better than gzip especially with the type of files you will expect to have in your hidden directories. If J is not available in your version of tar, use z instead.

Neither of these solutions are absolutely perfect, but they are at least simple. For the perfect score, see slava_dp’s comment:
http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/tarring-up-just-the-dotfiles/#comment-478

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