understanding what is going on. I'm reading up on this, and as soon
as I know enough to either understand the issue, or ask an
intelligent question, I will do so...
When a program is executed with arguments, there is a system
imposed limit on
the size of this argument list. On FreeBSD this limit can be seen
with sysctl
kern.argmax, which is the length in bytes.
When you do "ls *", what really happens is that the shell expands
the asterisk
to all entries in the current directory, except entries starting
with a dot
("hidden" files and directories). As a result, ls is really called as:
ls file1 file2 .... fileN
If the string length of file1 to fileN is bigger then kern.argmax,
then you
will get argument list too long error.
Mel,
What I get is this:
> sysctl kern.argmax
kern.argmax: 262144
Which is why I'm starting to think that (a) my problem is different
or (b) I'm so clueless that there isn't any problem at all, and I'm
just not understanding something (most likely scenario!)
I'm going to write a little script that generates a bunch of files to
test my hypothesis that once I get more than n files in a directory,
some things stop working correctly, like ls and ftp directory
listings, and to discover the value of n. That will give me some hard
data to work with.
This problem has been nagging at me for a while, so it's time I nail
it down once and for all...
I'll be back...
-- John
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
