Re: Command failure: Too Many Files (rm, ls, tar)

    > 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