bash: /bin/tar: Argument list too long when compressing many files with tar

linux bash tar
Giancarlo Ventura Granados picture Giancarlo Ventura Granados · May 23, 2014 · Viewed 17.7k times · Source

I am trying compress files from an archive with the command 

tar -czvf compress_file.tar.gz $(cat file_list.txt)

And I have an error

-bash: /bin/tar: Argument list too long

The files numbers is too long, how can I resolve this?

Answer

Mark Setchell picture Mark Setchell · May 23, 2014

Use the "-T" option to pass a file to tar that contains the filenames to tar up.

tar -cv -T file_list.txt -f tarball.tar

Related questions

tar: add all files and directories in current directory INCLUDING .svn and so on

I try to tar.gz a directory and use tar -czf workspace.tar.gz * The resulting tar includes .svn directories in subdirs but NOT in the current directory (as * gets expanded to only 'visible' files before it is passed to …

Read More
Tar a directory, but don't store full absolute paths in the archive

I have the following command in the part of a backup shell script: tar -cjf site1.bz2 /var/www/site1/ When I list the contents of the archive, I get: tar -tf site1.bz2 var/www/site1/style.css var/…

Read More
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format tar: Child returned status 1 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I have a bash script that creates a tar.gz and encrypts then sends to drive. However I cannot open the .tar.gz afterwards. Here is my process... Bash Script that encrypts. #!/bin/sh # tar the automysqlbackup directory tar -zcf "…

Read More