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.
Best Answer
Expanding on CristopheDs answer and assuming you're using bash:
The reason
xargs
doesn'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.