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Full Discussion: xargs vs exec with find:
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting xargs vs exec with find: Post 302671841 by Tribe on Saturday 14th of July 2012 06:03:44 PM
Old 07-14-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by alister
Keep in mind that if the size/number of the matching filenames exceeds what can be passed to tar in one invocation, that will silently revert to the original problem, of tar clobbering the archive generated by the previous iteration.

For archiving files found with find, pax or cpio are much more convenient than tar, since they can read the list on stdin.

Regards,
Alister
Exactly, there is a problem if the number of txt existing files exceed the maximum number of arguments that can be handled. For example this will fail on my system:

Code:
for i in {1..50000}; do echo >  file-$i.txt ; done
find ./ -type f -name "file-*.txt" -exec tar -cf txtarchive.tar {} + ;

There are 50000 txt files in dir:
Code:
find ./ -name "file-*.txt" | wc -l
50000

While in the tar there are only 3138 and no error was shown:
Code:
tar -tf txtarchive.tar  | wc -l
3138

-----------
On the other hand, independent exec with find for each argument is terribly slow when the number of arguments is high.

Could you provide examples with pax or cpio?
Last edited by Tribe; 07-14-2012 at 07:12 PM..
 

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virt-tar-out(1) 					      Virtualization Support						   virt-tar-out(1)

NAME

       virt-tar-out - Pack a virtual machine disk image directory into a tarball.

SYNOPSIS

	virt-tar-out -a disk.img /dir files.tar

	virt-tar-out -d domain /dir files.tar

	virt-tar-out -d domain /dir - | gzip --best > files.tar.gz

DESCRIPTION

       "virt-tar-out" packs a virtual machine disk image directory into a tarball.

       The first parameter is the absolute path of the virtual machine directory.  The second parameter is the tar file to write.  Use "-" to
       write to standard output.

EXAMPLES

       Download the home directories from a guest:

	virt-tar-out -d MyGuest /home - | gzip --best > homes.tar.gz

JUST A SHELL SCRIPT WRAPPER AROUND GUESTFISH

       This command is just a simple shell script wrapper around the guestfish(1) "tar-out" command.  For anything more complex than a trivial
       copy, you are probably better off using guestfish directly.

OPTIONS

       Since the shell script just passes options straight to guestfish, read guestfish(1) to see the full list of options.

SEE ALSO

       guestfish(1), virt-cat(1), virt-copy-in(1), virt-copy-out(1), virt-edit(1), virt-tar-in(1), <http://libguestfs.org/>.

AUTHORS

       Richard W.M. Jones ("rjones at redhat dot com")

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