tar: file changed as we read it

Question

I am using make and tar to backup. When executing makefile, tar command shows file changed as we read it. In this case,

Answer 1

Although its very late but I recently had the same issue.

Issue is because dir . is changing as xyz.tar.gz is created after running the command. There are two solutions:

Solution 1: tar will not mind if the archive is created in any directory inside .. There can be reasons why can't create the archive outside the work space. Worked around it by creating a temporary directory for putting the archive as:

mkdir artefacts
tar -zcvf artefacts/archive.tar.gz --exclude=./artefacts .
echo $?
0

Solution 2: This one I like. create the archive file before running tar:

touch archive.tar.gz
tar --exclude=archive.tar.gz -zcvf archive.tar.gz .
echo $?
0