How can I build a tar from stdin?

Question

How can I pipe information into tar specifying the names of the file?

Answer 1

Extending geekosaur answer:

find /directory | tar -cf archive.tar -T -

You can use stdin with the -T option.

Note that if you filter files using some condition (e.g. -name option) in general you need to exclude directories in the pipe, otherwise tar will process all their content, that is not what you want. So, use:

find /directory -type f -name "mypattern" | tar -cf archive.tar -T -

If you don't use -type, all the content of directories matching "mypattern" will be added !