How to tar directory and then remove originals including the directory?

Problem

I'm trying to a collection of files in a directory called 'my_directory' and remove the originals by using the command: However it is only removing the individual files inside the directory and not the directory itself (which is what I specified in the command). What am I missing here? EDIT: Yes, I suppose the 'remove-files' option is fairly literal. Although I too found the man page unclear on that point. (In linux I tend not to really distinguish much between directories and files that much, and forget sometimes that they are not the same thing). It looks like the consensus is that it doesn't remove directories. However, my major prompting point for asking this question stems from tar's handling of absolute paths. Because you must specify a relative path to a file/s to be compressed, you therefore must change to the parent directory to tar it properly. As I see it using any kind of follow-on 'rm' command is potentially dangerous in that situation. Thus I was hoping to simplify thing…