Creating directory inside tar file

[geo909]

Hello all,

I have a question, any help would be much appreciated.

Say I have a bunch of files

file1 file2 file3

among many others in the same folder, and I want to make a tar.gz file of these files. If I remember correctly, I could do something like

tar -czf my_compressed_file.tar.gz file1 file2 file3

but I would rather put everything in a folder inside the compressed file. In other words the contents of the compressed file should be

my_directory
my_directory/file1
my_directory/file2
my_directory/file3

Is there a way to do that with one command and without creating temporary folders and stuff?

Finally, say I have my compressed file as I want, and then I decide that I want to put file4 inside the already created folder my_directory of the compressed file. Can I do that without using many commands again?

Many thanks in advance

[falconindy]

You can either make an exclusion list (which accepts wildcards), or if you're going to do this often, make a phony directory with symlinks and use the -h flag to dereference them.

'man tar' has everything you need to know.