> for the command (rm *, ls *, tar cvzf xfer.tgz *) to continue. In these specific cases Bob showed ways to avoid passing a zillion arguments to the commands. But sometimes it is not possible to avoid. In those cases, xargs is your friend, as in find -name \*.c | xargs ls or whatever.
As for tar, let me also mention that it has an option (T) to read the file list from a file. karl
