Large number of files in single directory

[Chris]

There seems to be a filesystem limitation on most flavors of Linux I've 
worked on, in terms of a max number of files in a single directory - before 
tools like tar, gzip, rm, mv, cp and others stop working properly.  For 
example, I have some users that have 2000+ files in a single directory (some 
as many as 10,000 files) and trying to tar these directories is always 
coming up with "argument list too long."

Is there a way for tar and these other tools to "see" all these files and 
process them as normal?  I recall once I had to resort to something like 
"find . -print | xargs rm -fr" to remove thousands of files from a single 
directory.  Is doing something similar but replacing "rm" with "tar" the 
only way to make this work, or does tar have some sort of command line 
switch (I couldn't find one) to work with extremely long argument lists?

Chris