Avoiding tar's (or any other commandline's) argument list too long error
When you try to tar a large number of files (cp, mv, or anything else) you may hit the limit of ARG_MAX. You can overcome this by generating a list of files then feeding it to tar as follows:
# generate the file list find -iname '*.ext' > fileList.txt #run tar passing it the file list tar czvf archive.tar.gz --files-from fileList.txt # a shorthand of this would be: find . -name '*.ext' -print | tar -cvzf archive.tar.gz --files-from -
