Tar a directory, but don't store full absolute paths in the archive

tar -cjf site1.tar.bz2 -C /var/www/site1 .

In the above example, tar will change to directory /var/www/site1 before doing its thing because the option -C /var/www/site1 was given.

From man tar:

OTHER OPTIONS

  -C, --directory DIR
       change to directory DIR

The option -C works; just for clarification I'll post 2 examples:

1. creation of a tarball without the full path: full path /home/testuser/workspace/project/application.war and what we want is just project/application.war so:

   tar -cvf output_filename.tar  -C /home/testuser/workspace project
   

   Note: there is a space between workspace and project; tar will replace full path with just project .

2. extraction of tarball with changing the target path (default to ., i.e current directory)

   tar -xvf output_filename.tar -C /home/deploy/
   

   tar will extract tarball based on given path and preserving the creation path; in our example the file application.war will be extracted to /home/deploy/project/application.war.

   /home/deploy: given on extract
   project: given on creation of tarball

Note : if you want to place the created tarball in a target directory, you just add the target path before tarball name. e.g.:

tar -cvf /path/to/place/output_filename.tar  -C /home/testuser/workspace project

Seems -C option upto tar v2.8.3 does not work consistently on all the platforms (OSes). -C option is said to add directory to the archive but on Mac and Ubuntu it adds absolute path prefix inside generated tar.gz file.

tar target_path/file.tar.gz -C source_path/source_dir

Therefore the consistent and robust solution is to cd in to source_path (parent directory of source_dir) and run

tar target_path/file.tar.gz source_dir

or

tar -cf target_path/file.tar.gz source_dir

in your script. This will remove absolute path prefix in your generated tar.gz file's directory structure.