Problem scenario
You want to make copies of every file in a subdirectory and create a single .tar.gz file. What do you do?
Possible Solution #1 (the files with the full path aka directory tree they are in)
Run this command: tar -czvf archive.tar.gz /path/to/source/files/subdirectory/
The above command will take a copy of all the files in /path/to/source/files/subdirectory/ and create a single file that is compressed with those copies. It will copy the full path too. That is, when you decompress the files in a given directory (e.g., tmp), it will look like this:
/tmp/path/to/source/file/subdirectory/
All the files will then be in subdirectory.
Possible Solution #2 (just the files and no directories)
If you do not want the underlying subdirectory tree, then change directories to be in the subdirectory with the files and run this command:
tar -czvf archive.tar.gz .
# The above command will create a file called archive.tar.gz with all the files in the current directory with no directory path structure. This may be more desirable.