tar complains "No such file or directory"

Question

I'm using bash on Windows (distributed along with msysgit) to zip log files - one archive per date. Problem is, following script does not work and I have no idea why. Cut is here to get part of the filename that corresponds to a date the log was written.

find . -type f -name '*.log' | cut -c3-12 | head -n 5 | xargs -I common printf "%s%s\n" common "*.log" | xargs -I fg tar cvzf hello.tgz fg

Before last step, each line looks like this - 2014-07-04*.log
At the last step it gives me output like this:

tar: 2014-07-01*.log: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

I suspect it's because of a newline at the end, because when I call tar command by hand it works fine. Any ideas what I missed? I read some of the similar answers, but they don't seem to apply in my case. Archive name is for example, later I'd make it more descriptive.

Answer 1

The problem is this part:

xargs -I common printf "%s%s\n" common "*.log"

The *.log is inserted in the template as is. I don't understand why you put the "*" there at all. This would fix that:

xargs -I common printf "%s%s\n" common .log

However, the last tar command won't actually work, because the tar cvzf hello.tgz fg command will be executed for each file, and therefore you'll end up with a tar with a single file in it (the last one).

I believe this should be closer to what you want:

find . -type f -name '*.log' | cut -c3-12 | uniq | xargs -I{} sh -c 'tar zcvf {}.tgz {}*.log'

If you have files like:

2014-07-01.1.log
2014-07-01.2.log
2014-07-02.1.log
2014-07-02.5.log
2014-07-02.6.log

Then the command will put the first 2 into 2014-07-01.tgz and the last 3 into 2014-07-02.tgz.