How to tar certain file types in all subdirectories?

find ./someDir -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" | tar -cf my_archive -T -

If you're using bash version > 4.0, you can exploit shopt -s globstar to make short work of this:

shopt -s globstar; tar -czvf deploy.tar.gz **/Alice*.yml **/Bob*.json

this will add all .yml files that starts with Alice from any sub-directory and add all .json files that starts with Bob from any sub-directory.

One method is:

tar -cf my_archive.tar $( find -name "*.php" -or -name "*.html" )

There are some caveats with this method however:

It will fail if there are any files or directories with spaces in them, and it will fail if there are so many files that the maximum command line length is full.

A workaround to these could be to output the contents of the find command into a file, and then use the "-T, --files-from FILE" option to tar.

This will handle paths with spaces:

find ./ -type f -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" -exec tar uvf myarchives.tar {} +

Put them in a file

find . \( -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" \) -print > files.txt

Then use the file as input to tar, use -I or -T depending on the version of tar you use

Use h to copy symbolic links

tar cfh my.tar -I files.txt 

find ./ -type f -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" -printf '%P\n' |xargs tar -I 'pigz -9' -cf target.tgz

for multicore or just for one core:

find ./ -type f -name "*.php" -o -name "*.html" -printf '%P\n' |xargs tar -czf target.tgz

Easy with zsh:

tar cvzf foo.tar.gz **/*.(php|html)

If you want to produce a zipped tar file (.tgz) and want to avoid problems with spaces in filenames:

find . \( -name \*.php -o -name \*.html \) -print0 | xargs -0 tar -cvzf my_archive.tgz

The -print0 “primary” of find separates output filenames using the NULL (\0) byte, thus playing well with the -0 option of xargs.

The parentheses around the two -name primaries are needed, because otherwise the -print0 would only output the filenames of the second -name (there is no implied printing if -print or -print0 is present, and these only have an effect if they are evaluated).

If you need to skip some filenames or directories (e.g., the node_modules directory if you work with Node.js), prepend one or more -prune primaries like this:

find . -name skipThisName -prune -o \( -name \*.php -o -name \*.html \) -print0 | xargs -0 tar -cvzf my_archive.tgz