Question: I want to create a tar file where all of the directories and files are processed in alphabetical order. This is for the entire directory hierarchy that's being tarred up, so it would start by processing the first directory alphabetically, and then sub-directories in there alphabetically, etc. I looked through the man page and can't find a switch for this.

I will admit, this is half novelty, half slight optimization. I just can't believe that there isn't an easy way to do this. I must be missing something.

Answer: 
```
find . -depth -print0 | sort -z | pax -wvd0 > file.tar

```

Pax is sort of the POSIX successor to cpio and tar and kind of fuses the best aspects of both. It writes tar archives (ustar) by default. It also does automatic spanning and prompting for media and prints a summary when it's done.
As an alternative to @CharlieHerron's answer, if you are only interested in preserving content (files, symlink) and folder meta-data (e.g, folder permission, mtime, etc.), you may want to filter folders out of `find`'s output. 

```
find paths -not -type d -print 0 | sort -z | tar cf tarfile.tar --null -T -

```