Rohan Almeida’s Blog
Perl Developer. Linux Advocacy. Practicing Guitarist.

If you need to process a large number of files on the command line, you might get an error from bash (1), if the number of files are huge.

I needed to process around 13k HTML files, so my first move was to get all these files into a tar (1) file. The following command gives an error -

$ tar cf - *.html > all_html_files.tar
bash: /bin/tar: Argument list too long

One solution is to use find (1) in combination with xargs (1) as follows -

$ find . -name ‘*.html’ | xargs tar cf - > all_html_files.tar

Note the single quotes surrounding *.html. This goes directly to the find command without bash trying to expand the argument list.

More info is here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 3:10 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.