How can I build a tar from stdin?

Question

How can I pipe information into tar specifying the names of the file?

Answer 1

Something like:

tar cfz foo.tgz -T -

But keep in mind that this won't work for all possible filenames; you should consider the --null option and feed tar from find -print0. (The xargs example won't quite work for large file lists because it will spawn multiple tar commands.)