My sample was to illustrate how using xargs with tar could lead to undesired results if xargs needs to "split" the command.

If the output from the find is more than can be placed on a single command, xargs will execute the command given (tar in your case) multiple times. With each execution the output file will be created and when finished it will contain only the files that were placed on the last command started by xargs. You may not be running into the limit now, and you might not ever hit the limit, but you could and the only symptom would be a "partial" backup.


Did you check the table of contents of the file that it created? When I ran it on my system the tar file contained only the last file printed.

---------- Post updated at 18:29 ---------- Previous update was at 18:05 ----------

I've been playing round with ways to safely use tar with xargs... I think this should work for you and will eliminate the xargs risk:

Code:

find . -name "*.txt" -type f -mtime +10 | xargs -r tar -rzvf filetar.tar.gz

Yes, there are two -r options. The one for xargs is as decribed before. Replacing the -c option on the tar command with -r causes the archive to be updated (appended to) if it exists. I tested this on both FreeBSD and Linux.