Find and tar files on Solaris - unix

Question

I've got a little problem with my bash script. I'm newbie in unix world, so I find it difficult to deal with an exercise. What I have to do is find files on Solaris server with specific name, modified in specific time and archive them in one .tar file. First two points are easy, but I'm having a nightmare with trying to archive it. The thing is, I constantly archive whole tree of file (with file at the end) to .tar file, but I need just a file. My code looks like this:
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni | xargs -t -L 1 tar -cvf $3 -C
where $maska is the name of the file, $dni refers to modification time and $3 is just a archive name. I found out about -C switch, that let's me jump into the folder where desired file is, but when I use it with xargs, it seems just to jump there and do nothing else.
So my question is:
1) is there any possibility of achieving my goal this way?
Please remember, I don't work on gnu tar. And I HAVE TO use commands: tar, find.
Edit: I'd like to specify more my problem. When I use the script for, for example, file a, it should look for it since the point shown in script (it's ~ ) and everything it will find should be in one tar file.
What I got right now is (I'm in /home/me/Scripts):
-bash-3.2$ ./Script.sh a 1000 backup
a /home/me/Program/Test/a/ 0K
a /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.c 1K
a /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.out 8K
So script has done some packing. Next I want to see my packed file, so:
-bash-3.2$ tar -tf backup
/home/me/Program/Test/a/
/home/me/Program/Test/a/a.c
/home/me/Program/Test/a/a.out
And that's the problem. Tar file have all the paths in it, so if I will untar it, instead of getting just the file I wanted to archive, I will replace them in their old places. For visualisation:
-bash-3.2$ ls
Script.sh* Script.sh~* backup
-bash-3.2$ tar -xvf backup
x /home/me/Program/Test/a, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
x /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.c, 39 bytes, 1 tape blocks
x /home/me/Program/Test/a/a.out, 7928 bytes, 16 tape blocks
-bash-3.2$ ls
Script.sh* Script.sh~* backup
That's the problem.
So all I want is to pack all those desired file (a in example above) in one tar file without those paths, so it will simply untar in the directory I run the Script.sh.

Answer 1

I'm not sure to understand what you want but this might be it :
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni -exec tar cvf $3 {} +
Edit: second attempt after your wrote the main issue is the absolute path:
( cd ~; find . -name "$maska" -type f -mtime -$dni -exec tar cvf $3 {} + )
Edit: third attempt, after you wrote you want no path at all in the archive, maska is a directory name and $3 need to be in the current directory:
mkdir ~/foo && \
find ~ -name "$maska" -type d -mtime -$dni -exec sh -c 'ln -s $1/* ~/foo/' sh {} \; && \
( cd ~/foo ; tar chf - * ) > $3 && \
rm -rf ~/foo
Replace ~/foo by ~/somethingElse if ~/foo already exists for some reason.

Answer 2

Maybe you can do something like this:
#!/bin/bash
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; do
d=$(dirname "$file")
f=$(basename "$file")
echo $d: $f # Show directory and file for debug purposes
tar -rvf tarball.tar -C"$d" "$f"
done
I don't have a Solaris box at hand for testing :-)

Answer 3

First of all, my assumptions:
1. "one tar file", like you said, and
2. no absolute paths, ie if you backup ~/dir/file, you should be able to test extracting it in /tmp obtaining /tmp/dir/file.
If the problem is the full paths, you should replace
find ~ # etc
with
cd ~ || exit
find . # etc
If the tar archive isn't an absolute name, instead, it should be something like
(
cd ~ || exit
find . etc etc | xargs tar cf - etc etc
) > $3
Explanation
"(...)" runs a subshell, meaning some of the tings you change in there have no effects outside of the parens; the current directory is one of them, so "(cd whatever; foo)" means you run another shell, change its current directory, run foo from there, and then you're back in your script which never changed directory.
"cd ~ || exit" is paranoia, it means "cd ~; if that fails, exit".
"." is an alias meaning "the current directory, whatever that is"; play with "find ." vs "find ~" if you don't know what it means, you'll understand it better than if I explained it here.
"tar cf -" means that you create the tar archive on standard output; I think the syntax is portable enough, you may have to replace "-" with "/dev/stdout" or whatever works on solaris (the simplest solution is simply "tar", without the "c" command, but it's ugly to read).
The final "> $3", outside of the parens, is output redirection: rather than writing the output to the terminal, you save it into a file.
So the whole script reads like this:
- open a subshell
- change the subshell's current directory to ~
- in the subshell, find the files newer than requested, archive them, and write the contents of the resulting tar archive to standard output
- the subshell's stdout is saved to $3; because the redirection is outside the parens, relative paths are resolved relatively to your script's $PWD, meaning that eg if you run the script from the /tmp directory you'll get a tar archive in the /tmp directory (it would be in ~ if the redirection happened in the subshell).
If I misunderstood your question, the solution doesn't work or the explanation isn't clear let me know (the answer is too long, but I already know that :).

Answer 4

The pax command will output tar-compatible archives and has the flexibility you need to rewrite pathnames.
find ~ -name "$maska" -mtime -$dni | pax -w -x ustar -f "$3" -s '!.*/!!'
Here are what the options mean, paraphrasing from the man page:
-w write the contents of the file operands to the standard output (or to the pathname specified by the -f option) in an archive format.
-x ustar the output archive format is the extended tar interchange format specified in the IEEE POSIX standard.
-s '!.*/!!' Modifies file operands according to the substitution expression, using regular expression syntax. Here, it deletes all characters in each file name from the beginning to the final /.