Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Can someone please give me an example of using xargs on the below operation?
tar c $dir/temp/*.parse\ | lzma -9 > $dir/backup/$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')-archive.tar.lzma I get the error from bash ‘/bin/tar: Argument list too long‘
Particularily I am trying to do LZMA compression on about 4,500 files; so this isn’t surprising. I just don’t know how to modify the above to use xargs and get rid of the error! Thanks.
Expanding on CristopheDs answer and assuming you’re using bash:
The reason
xargsdoesn’t help you here is that it will do multiple invocations until all arguments have been used. This won’t help you here since that will create several tar archives, which you don’t want.