Re: ls command

[Richard Dawe]

Hello.

Rich wrote:
> I have come accross what seems to be a bug with the ls command.  It only
> happens in directories over a few thousand entries.
>
> For example, the directory I am testing has roughly 7,000 files.  We
> tried using:
>
> ls *_* 
>
> This produces a failure, [Too Many Arguments].

There are limits in how long the command-line can be. 7000 files is a 
fair number of files, so you are hitting those limits.

> These all work fine:
> ls
> ls -altr
> ls -1
>
> I tried other commands like find, tail, and grep. All work fine.
>         find . -name "*_*" -exec ls -l {} \;
>         tail *_*
>         grep "DATA ERROR" *_*
>
> BTW, the *_* produces ~4,300 files out of 7,000.
>
> Not sure if others have seen this type of failure.

Yes, I've seen it quite a few times.

You may find this command quicker than "find -exec":

  find . -name "*_*" -print0 | xargs --null ls -l

This also copes with spaces in the filenames by using nul as the separator.

Hope that helps, bye, Rich =]

--
Richard Dawe [ http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~phekda/richdawe/ ]

"You can't evaluate a man by logic alone."
  -- McCoy, "I, Mudd", Star Trek