title: How to use "xargs" properly when argument list is too long
body: <p>Can someone please give me an example of using xargs on the below operation?</p>
  
  <pre><code>tar c $dir/temp/*.parse\
      | lzma -9 &gt; $dir/backup/$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')-archive.tar.lzma
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the error from bash "<b>/bin/tar: Argument list too long</b>"</p>
  
  <p>Particularily I am trying to do LZMA compression on about 4,500 files; so this isn't surprising.  I just don't know how to modify the above to use xargs and get rid of the error! Thanks.</p>