Creating a tileindex for 50000 files

[John Preston]

I'm trying to use gdaltindex and then shptree to create a tile index
for 50000 .tif files but when I try to run gdaltindex I get:

gdaltindex data/jamaica/tileindex_res_1.shp res_1/*.tif
bash: gdaltindex: Argument list too long

I expect that the problem is that the shell is expanding the *.tif
into one long string to pass to gdaltindex, and this is too long. How
can I get around this.