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Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Arg list too long error while performing tar and zip operation Post 303031456 by Corona688 on Thursday 28th of February 2019 01:33:52 PM

Old

02-28-2019

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by stomp

If your tar supports -T / --files-from:

Code:

ls xyz* | tar --files-from=- --create --file ${abc}/backup_file.tar

...or short...

Code:

ls xyz* | tar -cT - -f ${abc}/backup_file.tar

See: Linux Manpages Online - man.cx manual pages

Cramming too many arguments into ls doesn't stop them from being too many arguments. When this happens you have to give up shell globbing.

Code:

rm -f backup_file.tar
ls | grep "^xyz" | xargs tar -rcf backup_file.tar
gzip backup_file.tar

xargs will run tar several times, as many as needed, to append every file to the tarball. (This is why there's an rm -- so that if you run it twice, it will start over instead of making the existing tarball bigger.)

This is less efficient than -T or cpio, especially in that it can't compress the tarball until after it's finished. But if those aren't options, this is how you can do it.

Corona688

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LEARN ABOUT LINUX

shtool-tarball

SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1)					      GNU Portable Shell Tool					     SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1)

NAME

       shtool-tarball - GNU shtool command for rolling standardized tarballs

SYNOPSIS

       shtool tarball [-t|--trace] [-v|--verbose] [-o|--output tarball] [-c|--compress prog] [-d|--directory directory] [-u|--user user]
       [-g|--group group] [-e|--exclude pattern] path [path ...]

DESCRIPTION

       This command is for rolling input files under path into a distribution tarballs which can be extracted by tar(1).

       The four important aspects of good open source software tarballs are: (1) unpack into a single top-level directory, (2) top-level directory
       corresponds to the tarball filename, (3) tarball files should be sorted and (4) arbitrary names for file owner and group.

OPTIONS

       The following command line options are available.

       -v, --verbose
	   Display some processing information.

       -t, --trace
	   Enable the output of the essential shell commands which are executed.

       -o, --output tarball
	   Output tarball to file tarball.

       -c, --compress prog
	   Pipe resulting tarball through compression program prog.

       -d, --directory directory
	   Sets the top-level directory into which the tarball unpacks.  By default it is tarball without the trailing ".tar.*" extension.

       -u, --user user
	   The user (owner) of files and directories in the tarball to user.

       -g, --group group
	   The group of files and directories in the tarball to group.

       -e, --exclude pattern
	   Exclude files and directories matching comma-separated list of regex pattern from the tarball. Directories are expanded before the
	   filtering takes place. The default filter pattern is ""CVS,\.cvsignore,\.svn,\.[oa]$"".

EXAMPLE

	#   Makefile.in
	dist:
	    ...
	    V=`shtool version -d short ...`; 
	    shtool tarball -o foobar-$$V.tar.gz -c 'gzip -9' 
			   -u bar -g gnu -e 'CVS,.cvsignore' .

HISTORY

       The GNU shtool tarball command was originally written by Ralf S.  Engelschall <rse@engelschall.com> in 1999 for GNU shtool.

SEE ALSO

       shtool(1), tar(1), compress(1).

18-Jul-2008							   shtool 2.0.8 					     SHTOOL-TARBALL.TMP(1)