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

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Bob Proulx [mailto:[email protected]] 
>Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 11:56
>To: Browder, Tom
>Cc: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: Command failure: Too Many Files (rm, ls, tar)
>Browder, Tom wrote:
>> Last week I started getting errors indicating there were too many 
>> files for the command (rm *, ls *, tar cvzf xfer.tgz *) to continue.
...
>You are running into the kernel's ARG_MAX limitation.  Please 
>see this reference for more information.
...
>For your 'tar' case you can avoid the argument expansion 
>entirely simply by giving '.' as the argument.
>
>  tar cvzf xfer.tgz .

Hm, when I try this the tgz archive gets sucked back into itself.

-Tom