Re: Argument list too long: limitation in grep? bash? FreeBSD?

[Bill Moran]

From: Shantanu Mahajan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
+++ Bill Moran [freebsd] [24/12/02 17:25 -0500]:
| Anyway, I'm trying to find the docs on some features that
| the www.php.net's search isn't really helping on (searching
| for __FILE__ doesn't search for __FILE__ ... it searches for
| file, and there's too many results) so I try:
| grep __FILE__ *.html
| and I get the error:
| - -bash: /usr/bin/grep: Argument list too long
| Is this a shortcoming of bash, grep or FreeBSD?  I'm assuming
| it's not grep, as the command:
| find . -name *.html -print | xargs grep __FILE__
| yeilds:
| - -bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long

try this one

find . -iname "*.html" -exec grep "__FILE__" {} \;

I think the magic in this answer is the quotes around *.html,
which (as Greg pointed out) prevent the shell from expanding
the wildcard, thus the limit doesn't affect the command.

or maybe you can use "locate"

Hadn't thought to try that, although I don't know how it would
work. I also didn't want to wait for the locate database to
update before doing the search. (although I had to wait for
replies from thet list - in the future I won't have to)

Thanks for the feedback.
-Bill

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