Strange results using Linux find

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I am trying to set up a backup shell script that shall run once per week on my server and keep the weekly backups for ten weeks and it all works well, except for one thing...

I have a folder that contains many rather large files, so the ten weekly backups of that folder take up quite a large amount of disk space and many of the larger in that folder files rarely change, so I thought I would split the backup of that folder in two: one for the smaller files that is included in the 'normal' weekly backup (and kept for ten weeks) and one file for the larger files that is just updated every week, without the older weekly versions being kept.

I have used the following command for the larger files:

/usr/bin/find /other/projects -size +100M -print0 | /usr/bin/xargs -0 /bin/tar -rvPf /backup/PRJ-files_LARGE.tar

That works as expected. The tar -v option is there for debugging. However, when archiving the smaller files, I use a similar command:

/usr/bin/find /other/projects -size -100M -print0 | /usr/bin/xargs -0 /bin/tar -rvPf /backup/PRJ-files_$FILE_END.tar

Where $FILE_END is the weekly number. The line above does not work. I had the script run the other day and it took hours and produced a file that was 70 Gb, though the expected output size is about 14 Gb (there are a lot of files). It seems there is some duplication of files in the large file. I have not been able to fully check though. Yesterday I ran the command above for the smaller files from the command line and I could see that files I know to be larger than 100 Mb were included.

However, just now I ran find /other/projects -size -100M from the command line and that produced the expected list of files.

So, if anyone has a any ideas what I am doing wrong I would really appreciate tips or pointers. The file names include spaces and all sorts of characters, e.g. single quote, if that has something to do with it.

The only thing I can think of is that I am not using xargs properly and admittedly I am not very familiar with that, but I still think that the problem lies in my use of find since it is find that gives the input to xargs.

asked 2 mins ago

mdv

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Strange results using Linux find