At 13:59 2003-03-12, Andrew Markebo wrote:
/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: |>> Got two words for you: 'find' and 'xargs'... ;-) | | Thank you. I guess I phrased myself badly. I wasn't saying "How do I do | this?" (I think ls -AlR gives me pretty well what I was after). I was saying | "Once I could do this. Now I can't. Does anybody know if anything has | altered recently? and can anybody explain the phenomenon?" Anyway, it seems | from an earlier response to be something bash-related, so I imagine for the | moment I am stuck with it. Thanks again. Fergus
Well it is related to the shell yes. Limitation of the length of the prompt the shell can handle. (I think ;-))
The prompt? Did I miss something?
There's a limit in all Unix / Linux / POSIX systems on the amount of argument and evironment data that can be passed through the exec(2). That limit varies from system to system, naturally. There might be a POSIX lower bound on that limit, but I'm too lazy to look that up at the moment (it doesn't show up in "ulimit -a").
So if you've got to deal with unbounded quantities of argument data, you've got to be prepared to deal with some kind of limit. Xargs is a generic solution when the arguments don't all need to be processed in a single invocation of the program to which those arguments are being passed. In other cases, it may be necessary to implement a scheme whereby the program can read argument strings from a file.
More and more files coming into the subdir, or the contents are static? Or hmm, could be a compilation switch to the compilation of bash, but wouldn't think so..
/Andy
Randall Schulz
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