On Thursday 08 December 2016 11:34, BartC wrote: > On 07/12/2016 23:35, Steve D'Aprano wrote: >> On Thu, 8 Dec 2016 02:19 am, BartC wrote: >> >>> On 07/12/2016 14:34, Steve D'Aprano wrote: >> [...] >>>> I don't know why you are so hung up over the number of characters here, >>>> or this bogeyman of "one million files" in a directory. >>> >>> Because /you/ brought it up as a reason why 'globbing' would help when >>> there are command limits? >> >> I did? >> >> I don't remember saying any such thing. Citation required. > > In the part you snipped: > > On 07/12/2016 05:15, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > On Wednesday 07 December 2016 12:55, BartC wrote: > > > >> But even Linux's 128KB will fill [fail?] if someone wanted a command > line that > >> listed 20,000 files individually. But it would be spectacularly bad use > >> of a command line interface which was designed for humans. > > > > That's EXACTLY the point of having the shell do globbing.
Right. I meant that rather than have to list 20,000 files by hand, which would be a "spectacularly bad use of a command line interface", I can use globbing. I think in this particular question we're just responding to different things. I didn't mean that globbing was a solution to the limits of command line length. I meant it was a solution to the poor command line interface (i.e. expecting the user to write out all 20,000 files by hand). In fact, I think I was the first person to mention the command line limits, and linked to a page that discussed them in detail. (The "Too Many Arguments" limit that people occasionally run into isn't a shell limitation, but the Unix exec command limit.) -- Steven "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." - Jon Ronson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
