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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting cowardly refusing to create an empty archive Post 302574183 by agama on Wednesday 16th of November 2011 06:29:25 PM
Old 11-16-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by stunnerz_84
@agama..I did try your code..It printed out all the files (including zip files) in that directory and created a zip of all the mentioned files..But what i am not sure is..how would this help me out...Please make me understand!!!

Thanks Again!!!!
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.
 

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TAR(1)							      General Commands Manual							    TAR(1)

NAME
tar - archiver SYNOPSIS
tar key [ file ... ] DESCRIPTION
Tar saves and restores file trees. It is most often used to transport a tree of files from one system to another. The key is a string that contains at most one function letter plus optional modifiers. Other arguments to the command are names of files or directories to be dumped or restored. A directory name implies all the contained files and subdirectories (recursively). The function is one of the following letters: c Create a new archive with the given files as contents. x Extract the named files from the archive. If a file is a directory, the directory is extracted recursively. Modes are restored if possible. If no file argument is given, extract the entire archive. If the archive contains multiple entries for a file, the lat- est one wins. t List all occurrences of each file in the archive, or of all files if there are no file arguments. r The named files are appended to the archive. The modifiers are: v (verbose) Print the name of each file treated preceded by the function letter. With t, give more details about the archive entries. f Use the next argument as the name of the archive instead of the default standard input (for keys x and t) or standard output (for keys c and r). u Use the next (numeric) argument as the user id for files in the output archive. This is only useful when moving files to a non-Plan 9 system. g Use the next (numeric) argument as the group id for files in the output archive. EXAMPLES
Tar can be used to copy hierarchies thus: {cd fromdir; tar c .} | {cd todir; tar x} SOURCE
/sys/src/cmd/tar.c SEE ALSO
ar(1), bundle(1), tapefs(1) BUGS
There is no way to ask for any but the last occurrence of a file. File path names are limited to 100 characters. The tar format allows specification of links and symbolic links, concepts foreign to Plan 9: they are ignored. TAR(1)
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