/bin/tar: Argument list too long

If you find yourself stuck with over 30,000 files in a directory (text files in this example), packing them into a tar file can be tricky. You can get around it with this:

find . -name '*.txt' -print >/tmp/test.manifest
tar -cvzf textfiles.tar.gz --files-from /tmp/test.manifest
find . -name '*.txt' | xargs rm -v