Tar archiving that takes input from a list of files

Question

Yes:

tar -cvf allfiles.tar -T mylist.txt

Assuming GNU tar (as this is Linux), the -T or --files-from option is what you want.

You can also pipe in the file names which might be useful:

find /path/to/files -name \*.txt | tar -cvf allfiles.tar -T -

Some versions of tar, for example, the default versions on HP-UX (I tested 11.11 and 11.31), do not include a command line option to specify a file list, so a decent work-around is to do this:

tar cvf allfiles.tar $(cat mylist.txt)

On Solaris, you can use the option -I to read the filenames that you would normally state on the command line from a file. In contrast to the command line, this can create tar archives with hundreds of thousands of files (just did that).

So the example would read

tar -cvf allfiles.tar -I mylist.txt

For me on AIX, it worked as follows:

tar -L List.txt -cvf BKP.tar