[uug] Find and xargs

[Jacob Fugal]

I'm writing a script to backup information here at work. However, the 
files I want to back up are spread all over a gigantesque directory 
tree. Within the same directory tree are many large files, such as 
images, that I don't want to include in the backup tarball -- for both 
time and space considerations.

I though to approach this by using find to get the approriate files and 
then feed them as command line parameters to tar, via xargs. I've worked 
my find statement all out, and am happy with the list of files it gives 
me. However, if I just do something like:

find /root/of/tree [conditions] | xargs tar -cjf backup.tar.bz

Then only the last 20 or so files end up in the tar ball. That's because 
xargs ends up executing tar several times; not once for each file, but 
more than once, which isn't what I want.

I could create the empty archive first, then do tar -cAjf backup.tar.bz 
as the xargs parameter to append files to the archive. But this is 
slightly less efficient since the archive is being opened and closed 
each time xargs appends more files -- which in my case could be a 
hundred times or more.

Is there a way to force xargs to execute the statement it's given only 
once, or do I have to go with the alternative above?

Jacob Fugal

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