More efficient way to find & tar millions of files

Question

I\'ve got a job running on my server at the command line prompt for a two days now:

find data/ -name filepattern-*2009* -exec tar uf 2009.tar {} ;

Answer 1

If you already did the second command that created the file list, just use the -T option to tell tar to read the files names from that saved file list. Running 1 tar command vs N tar commands will be a lot better.