Browder, Tom wrote: > Last week I started getting errors indicating there were too many files > for the command (rm *, ls *, tar cvzf xfer.tgz *) to continue. > ... > Is there a magic number limit on those commands? > Or am I doing something wrong.
You are running into the kernel's ARG_MAX limitation. Please see this reference for more information. http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/#Argument-list-too-long > I regularly copy the files to a transfer directory, cd to that > directory, and tar them and gzip them (tar cvzf xfer.tgz *) to take > them to another site. For your 'tar' case you can avoid the argument expansion entirely simply by giving '.' as the argument. tar cvzf xfer.tgz . For 'rm *' I would normally either simply remove the entire directory with 'rm -rf ./dir' or use 'find' like this: find . -exec rm {} + For 'ls *' there is no need of the '*'. Just use ls. Actually using 'ls *' is inefficient because the shell expands the * to match every filename in the directory and ls then lists it. But the entire purpose of ls is to list directories. So 'ls *' does the same work twice while 'ls' does it once. Better to simply use 'ls'. ls Bob
