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

One option is to use cpio to generate a tar-format archive:

$ find data/ -name "filepattern-*2009*" | cpio -ov --format=ustar > 2009.tar

cpio works natively with a list of filenames from stdin, rather than a top-level directory, which makes it an ideal tool for this situation.