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 {} ;

It is taking forever, and then some. Yes, there are millions of files in the target directory. (Each file is a measly 8 bytes in a well hashed directory structure.) But just running...

find data/ -name filepattern-*2009* -print > filesOfInterest.txt

...takes only two hours or so. At the rate my job is running, it won't be finished for a couple of weeks.. That seems unreasonable. Is there a more efficient to do this? Maybe with a more complicated bash script?

A secondary questions is "why is my current approach so slow?"

Answer 1

There is xargs for this:

find data/ -name filepattern-*2009* -print0 | xargs -0 tar uf 2009.tar

Guessing why it is slow is hard as there is not much information. What is the structure of the directory, what filesystem do you use, how it was configured on creating. Having milions of files in single directory is quite hard situation for most filesystems.

Answer 2

The way you currently have things, you are invoking the tar command every single time it finds a file, which is not surprisingly slow. Instead of taking the two hours to print plus the amount of time it takes to open the tar archive, see if the files are out of date, and add them to the archive, you are actually multiplying those times together. You might have better success invoking the tar command once, after you have batched together all the names, possibly using xargs to achieve the invocation. By the way, I hope you are using 'filepattern-*2009*' and not filepattern-*2009* as the stars will be expanded by the shell without quotes.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Here's a find-tar combination that can do what you want without the use of xargs or exec (which should result in a noticeable speed-up):

tar --version    # tar (GNU tar) 1.14 

# FreeBSD find (on Mac OS X)
find -x data -name "filepattern-*2009*" -print0 | tar --null --no-recursion -uf 2009.tar --files-from -

# for GNU find use -xdev instead of -x
gfind data -xdev -name "filepattern-*2009*" -print0 | tar --null --no-recursion -uf 2009.tar --files-from -

# added: set permissions via tar
find -x data -name "filepattern-*2009*" -print0 | \
    tar --null --no-recursion --owner=... --group=... --mode=... -uf 2009.tar --files-from -

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

To correctly handle file names with weird (but legal) characters (such as newlines, ...) you should write your file list to filesOfInterest.txt using find's -print0:

find -x data -name "filepattern-*2009*" -print0 > filesOfInterest.txt
tar --null --no-recursion -uf 2009.tar --files-from filesOfInterest.txt