update tar archive in the relative directory

Question

when I want to create a tar archive in a relative path, I can do this:

tar cf archiveName.tar -C relative/path  someDirectory

but when I want to update the archive, this

tar uf archiveName.tar -C relative/path someDirectory 

gives me the following errors:

tar: someDirectory/someFile: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
... (same error for all files and dirs in someDirectory)
tar: Exiting with faliure...

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Although the man page of GNU tar doesn't mentioned, I wonder that -C option only works with c (create) or r (replace) operations.

Unix man page wrote:

-C directory file
Performs a chdir (see cd(1)) operation on directory and performs the c (create) or r (replace) operation on file . Use short relative path names for file . If file is `.', archive all files in directory. This option enables archiving files from multiple directories not related by a close common parent.

So, you can use r (replace) option instead:

tar rf archiveName.tar -C relative/path someDirectory