On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 12:13, Dan Muey wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
>
> Howdy
>
> >
> > We use the Barracuda Spam appliance (barracudanetworks.com)
> > to filter our spam and their web based interface is written
> > in Perl. They have a form that allows the user to search
> > messages for key words. Evidentally it stores the each
> > message in a file in a directory and when trying to search
> > several hundred thousand messages for a word the response back
> > is:
> >
> > egrep: argument list too long
> >
>
> If I was trying to grep a zillion files at once and it wouldn't
> let me I'd probably grep them one at a time.
> For instance via the backtivck execution You might have:
>
> my @matchedfiles = qx(cat `ls /files/` |grep $string);
> # a really bad way to do this but for example's sake...
>
> You could do:
>
> for(`ls /files/`) {
> if(`cat $_ |grep $string`) { push(@matchedfiles,$_); }
> }
Are you sure about using ls? We have directory here that has several
thousand files in it and when doing an ls *.whatever-extension we always
get an "argument list too long".
Any idea what the actual file limit is for grep?
>
> Then you are only greping one file at a time instead of a list of too many.
> Of course what would be better is to use the readdir() functions to list the files
> and open() and grep() combo to grep the contents. But the same principle applies.
>
> Just make sure the barracuda folks says thanks for fixing their problem :)
Yeah, we're hoping for a few months of service for free.....:)
This was also a personal quest to find the answer for myself. So either
way I win.
Thanks for your help,
Kevin
--
Kevin Old <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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