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Mokus
Asked: 2014-02-04 13:38:59 +0800 CST

How can I backup large amount of small files?

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A Windows filesystem is mounted through samba and I am trying to compress a large amount of small files:

find /path/to/files/ -newermt "2012-01-01 00:00:00" -path '*/*log.txt'  -exec tar cvfz log_file_system.tar.gz {} +

but after a while the size of the tarball is reseted.

/path/to/files/log1.txt
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names <- the size of the tar became zero
/path/to/files/log2.txt

Why is this happening? How can I fix that?

backup

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The -exec "+" option will only build a command line that's up to a limited length. Once the total command line length exceeds this size, it will start a new command line. This problem is similar to xargs.

    You'll want to pipe the file name input to tar, using -T-.

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