On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 04:11:51PM +0200, Gergely Nagy wrote: > > > > This small wrapper program will make other programs see files and > > > > directories in a consistent, sorted order. This is e.g. usefull if you > > > > want your tarballs to be a bit more rsyncable. > > > > > > How is this better than tar cvf foo.tar $(find foo | sort) ? > > > > I guess that if you try to do it for something ass big as the kernel > > source tree (for example), you would exceed both the maximal number of > > arguments and the maximal length of the command line. Moreover, that > > would fail with oddly-named files/directories that contain spaces, > > carriage returns or tabs in their name... > > That's what find foo | sort | xargs tar rvf foo.tar is for. Handles > spaces, no command-line length overflow, no nothing, and does the same, > methinks.
I guess you should add '\! -type d' to your find command. Anyway, that won't work if some file/directory contains a newline symbol. (Using this would be stupid, but it's legal.) Nicolas