How do I exclude absolute paths for tar?
You are incorrectly using the -C switch, which is used for changing directories. So what you need to do is:
tar -cf tarname.tar -C /www/path path/file1.txt path2/path3/file2.xlsor if you want to package everything under /www/path do:
tar -cf tarname.tar -C /www/path .You can use -C switch multiple times.
If you want to remove the first n leading components of the file name, you need strip-components. So in your case, on extraction, do
tar xvf tarname.tar --strip-components=2The man page has a list of tar's many options, including this one. Some earlier versions of tar use --strip-path for this operation instead.