How to create a tar archive without the parent directory

Create a tar archive called my-directory.tar of my-directory/ without the parent directory.

You can use this short tar command.

              
                  tar -C my-directory -cvf my-directory.tar .
              
          

Or this more verbose tar command.

              
                  tar --cd my-directory --create --verbose --file my-directory.tar .
              
          

Make sure you include the trailing ., as this tells tar to include everything from the root of the directory once it's done the cd.

Options explained

1. -C, --cd or --directory tells tar to change (cd) into the directory before creating, listing, extracting, appending to etc. the archive
2. -c or --create tells tar to create a new archive
3. v or --verbosetells tar to produce verbose output
4. f or --filetells tar that the next parameter will be the tar file to create, extract, append to, list, etc.

More commands for creating tar archives

• Create a tar archive of a directory
• Create a tar archive of multiple directories
• Create a tar archive without the hidden files
• Create a tar archive of files by filetype
• Create a tar archive of files by multiple filetypes
• Create a tar archive excluding a directory
• Create a tar archive excluding multiple directories
• Create a tar archive of a directory excluding files of a specific filetype
• Create a tar archive of a directory excluding files by multiple filetypes