UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,


I have many files (.DXF) in many sub-folders.
In these sub-folders, I have other files too

I want to make a recursive tar file with only .DXF files

Does anyone can help me to find the right command ?

Regards,

Michel

Something like

Code:

find . -name "*.DXF" | xargs tar cvf foo.tar

Cheers
ZB

Damn, I wish I knew that last night. Thanks.

Ummm, hold the phone here....

xargs gathers up a command-line sized collection of arguments and runs the specified command. If everything won't fit in one command lind, it will use a second or third or as many as it takes. You're going to be left with the last archive.

Unless I've missed something...

Perderabo - you're right! I only tested the command on a small sample of data (around 30 files).

I suppose you could use something like tar cvf - `find ./ -name "*.DXF" -print` > backup.tar - or would that still have limitations?

Cheers
ZB

Hmmm.... been thinking about this one again. The previous command would probably still suffer from a limit on the maximum number of files allowed in one command line.

The easiest way to do this would probably be with a script such as

Code:

#!/bin/sh

tarfile=/path/to/tarfile.tar

find /path/to/files/ -name "*.DXF" -print > filelist

while read line
do
  if [ ! -e "$tarfile" ]; then
     tar cvf $tarfile $line
  else
     tar rvf $tarfile $line
  fi
done < filelist

exit 0

I haven't tested that, and it'd probably be fairly slow because it would spawn a tar process for each update. But it would overcome any limitation on maximum args.

Cheers
ZB