I have a need to create a tar of two sibling folders and send it to a client for extraction on their Mac OS desktop by double-clicking it. yes, that's a requirement of theirs.
so I go:
cd ~/Desktop
tar -cvf ~/Desktop/files.tar folder1 folder2
#folder1 and folder2 are sibling sub folders of ~/Desktop and contain additional files and sub folders
the problem is that when I (or the client) double click on files.tar (which initiates the extraction), it first creates a top level directory called files and only then the two sub folders (~/Desktop/files/folder1 and ~/Desktop/files/folder2) ... rather than creating ~/Desktop/folder1 and ~/Desktop/folder2. This creates a problem for the client with path dependencies.
is there a way to force a creation of such a .tar or .zip that doesn't create the top level folder first ? (with the name made up from its file name) and extracts the content directly to the current location ?
cheers