When I do the following:tar czvf ../myarchive.tar.gz ./I get a single (annoying) root folder in my tar archive:How do I remove this awful period when creating the archive?
Create a tar archive of the current directory without preceding period
tar
You don't.name=${PWD##*/}cd ..tar czf $name.tar.gz $name(Note: this doesn't work if your shell has current directory symbolic link tracking turned on and the current directory is accessed via a symbolic link.)Yes, this isn't what you asked, but this is what you should do. Archives that expand a lot of files in the current directory are annoying: it puts the burden of creating a target directory for the file on each person who unpacks the archive, andif they accidentally unpack them in a non-empty directory, it's hard to clean up. Most of the time, an archive should create a single toplevel directory whose name is the base name of the archive.