Find files and tar them (with spaces)

There could be another way to achieve what you want. Basically,

1. Use the find command to output path to whatever files you're looking for. Redirect stdout to a filename of your choosing.

2. Then tar with the -T option which allows it to take a list of file locations (the one you just created with find!)

   find . -name "*.whatever" > yourListOfFiles
   tar -cvf yourfile.tar -T yourListOfFiles
   

Use this:

find . -type f -print0 | tar -czvf backup.tar.gz --null -T -

It will:

• deal with files with spaces, newlines, leading dashes, and other funniness
• handle an unlimited number of files
• won't repeatedly overwrite your backup.tar.gz like using tar -c with xargs will do when you have a large number of files

Also see:

• GNU tar manual
• How can I build a tar from stdin?, search for null