Too many arguments with tar
By Geoff W. on Aug. 13, 2008.
Occasionally, when compressing directories with large numbers of files and/or directories contained within them, you will get an error stating: Too many arguments.
This is not an error from the application - rather it is an error from the shell tell you the ARG_MAX limit has been reached. Here is what you can do to avoid/get around that:
If you find that you can not compress a directory because it contains to many files, you can do one of two things:
Compress the container directory or:
Generate the file list
find -iname '*.ext' > file_list.txt
Run tar, passing it the file list
tar czvf archive.tar.gz --files-from file_list.txt
Shorthand of this would be:
find . -name '*.ext' -print | tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz --files-from -
Category: Linux