Extraction of .tar.gz creates additional unwanted directories

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm working on a project that requires me to compress then relocate directories to a different location based on their last date of modification. After running the script I check to see if it worked, and upon unzipping the tar.gz using [tar -zxvf] I created everything that should be there is. I then performed the [ls] command, and saw that two additional directories had shown up after the extraction of the tar.gz, my home and downloads directories.

I'm VERY new to bash so I am probably missing something obvious but here is my script, and help would be appreciated!

cd ../Downloads
JULY=$(find . -type f -newermt 2012-07-09 ! -newermt  2012-07-10)

tar -zcvf July_compressed.tar.gz /home/josh/Downloads/${JULY} 
    cp July_compressed.tar.gz /home/josh/Documents/July
2

I'm not sure of your exact requirements.

This is how to move a directory's contents - from ./old to ./new

cd /path/to/old
mkdir /path/to/archives/new
tar cvf - . | ( cd /path/to/archives/new;  tar xf -)

Pipe from one tar in the old directory to tar in the new one.

3

I need to move files from one directory into another directory based on their modification date. I'll be moving the files from the old directories to 12 new directories based on months of the year. How would include only files with set modification date in your script?

4 
cd /path/to/old
mkdir /path/to/archives/new
JULY=$(find . -type f -newermt 2012-07-09 ! -newermt  2012-07-10)
tar cvf -  $JULY | ( cd /path/to/archives/new;  tar xf -)

using your find statement result:

5 
gzip -dc file.gz | tar -xvf -