tar frustration

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <7056 at conexch.UUCP> root at conexch.UUCP (Larry Dighera) writes:
>This is so simple that it makes me feel like I don't understand the problem.

That's right...

>	tar cvf /dev/whatever `cat file_of_names`

There is a fairly small limit to the total number of bytes available
for the arguments to a command; something like 4096 to 10240 bytes.
It would be very easy to exceed this when archiving a large tree.