Argument list too long

[Chris Ross]

On Mar 7, 2013, at 11:15 AM, Lars Engels wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 05:50:36PM +0200, Vladislav Prodan wrote:
>> Why 12K small files from one directory to cause problems?
>> 
>> # ll | wc -l
>>   11467
>> 
>> # grep X-PHP-Script * | more
>> /sbin/grep: Argument list too long.
>> 
>> # egrep X-PHP-Script *.ua | more
>> /usr/sbin/egrep: Argument list too long.
>> 
>> # cat *.ua | grep X-PHP-Script | more
>> /sbin/cat: Argument list too long.
>> 
> 
> Your shell can't process that many arguments. Use this:
> 
> grep -R "X-PHP-Script" .
> 
> or if you don't want to descent into subdirectories:
> 
> find . -type -f -name '*.ua' -maxdepth 1 -exec grep "X-PHP-Script" {} \+

  Those solutions will work, but the problem is actually the inability of the shell to start a process with that long of an argument list.  (ARG_MAX bytes).  The shell can process them, just not hand them off to another process via the argument vector.

  echo * | xargs grep X-PHP-Script | more

will also work.  (man xargs for more information)

  Sorry to be a bit pedantic.

                                - Chris