Chris Starling writes:
>
> In a perhaps unrelated problem, I've experienced weirdness when using
> the * wildcard when copying a large number of files. The cp process will
> freeze completely, although the machine is fine. I can kill the shell out
> from under it, but I can't kill -9 the cp process. I say perhaps unrelated
> because maybe it's caused by the same 63 file problem, although I'm
> certain it's NOT what's causing it because I hand-created 63 files using
> "cat /dev/null >" and got the message.
>
I have frequently experienced very bizare behavoir whenever the commandline
for a program gets very long, including hung processes, a hung system, and
some really messy crashes. I think this is the problem you are having with
wildcards. Somewhere the length of the commandline is not being checked,
and is overwriting some vital data. I have an entry for this problem in the
BUGS file in the source distribution, and on the website.
Al
