On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM, Leonard den Ottolander <leonard at den.ottolander.nl> wrote: > Hello Johan, > > On Sun, 2011-01-23 at 14:51 -0600, Johan Martinez wrote: >> I want to backup a directory using tar, but want separate tarballs for >> each subdirectory. For example: # ls dir1 >> subdir1 subdir2 subdir3 > > Use find(1) for such cases. > > $ find <dir> -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec tar cz {} -f {}.tgz \; > > Regards, > Leonard. Ahh-ahh-ahh! You forgot some subdirectories, especially generated from projects served to Windows systems, may have spaces in their names, and you'll want parentheses around those "{}" bits. Without those, chaos can ensue. And don't get me *started* on what happens if some smart aleck starts slipping "$" into directory names. This is particularly common in Samba mounts of CIFS shares where the share creators cleverly left "$" on the names of the shares to keep them from being browsed.