soonix:

Heh, heh! In fact, when I was writing that response, I thought that tar would have such an option. But after listing through the first three or so pages of the dox, I got tired of looking. Then I thought I'd just xargs to convert the file into a list of command-line arguments. I nearly wrote it as cat mylist.txt | xargs | ... but didn't want to earn another "useless use of cat" award, so I just used xargs <mylist.txt to do the task.

After your response, I again looked at man tar and found the option ... on the thirteenth page! Since my terminal is 57 lines long, that seems a bit excessive. I'm thinking that the man page for tar ought to be rearranged a bit, as that sounds like an option that's generally useful, and there are quite a few options that seem to be much more specialized, and hence useful in fewer situations. (I've never needed --hole-detection or --check-device both of which are on page 4.) Now that I'm aware of -T, though, I'll hopefully remember it for the next time. ;^)

...roboticus

When your only tool is tar, all problems look like you're gonna have to read "War and Peace", possibly several times.