I feel certain there is command line magic that will enable me to

• use find to identify a set of files
• use tar to create an archive of all matching files

I get find to create a list of files that I really want, but
I'm dashed if I can discover how to tell tar to roll-up
all of those files. If I use find's -exec option, it runs tar for each
filename. Ugh! Telling tar that input is $(find ...) results in a command line that is correct but too long.

I think that I want to tell tar to read the list of files from STDIN,
but I cannot discover how to do that if it is possible. I thought that the option "--" double-dash but having that right-most on the tar command did not work. (I likely scrambled it somehow.)

~~~ 0;-Dan

I've discovered that there is a --files-from=filename option to tar. This expects a list of files to store or extract.

This option permitted the following:
Notice the command is really two commands with semicolon separator.
They could be two separate lines.

Does someone know a better way?

~~~ 0;-Dan

No need for the log file if you can pipe the results of find through xargs and tar, e.g.
the --no-recursion option ensures that tar does not archive directories twice.

Aarg! (sorry) xargs is one of those shell commands that I always forget about until a colleage shows me how it is exactly what I needed.

Thanks,
~~~ 0;-Dan

A couple of WARNINGS about doing things this way.

1. Most likely, some of the found files will contain blanks within the filename or path. Those blanks cause confusion to xarg's blank-based delimiters. You can alter how xargs behaves with the --null or -0 option. It tells xargs to expect arguments separated with \000 instead of whitespace.

2. If you are feeding xargs from find, as I want to do, find has the -print0 option. Using this option, find reports items that match separated by \000 instead of whitespace.

As presented on the xargs man-page, an example use might be
This example will find files named core in or below the directory /tmp and delete them, processing filenames in such a way that file or directory names containing spaces or newlines are correctly handled.

I think I can safely mark this issue solved.
Thanks to all,
~~~ 0;-Dan

This is exactly the reason why I suggested -print0 and -0 in my example. Glad to see the problem is solved. Cheers.