Tar command using Exec (using source FileCollection in command line)

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1

When using the Tar task in Gradle to create a tar.gz, Gradle does not support symbolic links. I therefore wanted to try and override the Tar task within the distribution plugin to run an Exec and manually run the tar command.
I currently have the following (some common files in main, os specific files in linux/windows folders):

distributions {
    main {
        contents {
            ...
        }
    }
    linux {
        contents {
            with(main.contents)
            ...
        }
    }
    windows {
        contents {
            with(main.contents)
            ...
        }
    }
}

tasks.withType(Tar) {
    actions = []
    doLast {
        exec {
            mkdir "${destinationDir}"
            executable "tar"
            args "-czvf"
            args "${destinationDir}/${archiveName}"
            args source.files
    }
}

When I build I only run the linuxDistTar task on a Linux machine
But this throws an error:
Cannot run program "tar" (in directory "..."): error=7, Argument list too long

I think it’s because the source.files is giving all the files from the original Tar task as a space separated list and there are a lot of files.

Is there a way of getting the root directory of a source list and using that? Or do I need to extract source into a dummy folder then pass dummyFolder/* as the last argument?

I’m using Gradle 3.5.1 if that helps.