On Sunday, 19 November 2006 18:23, Russ Kepler wrote:
> On Sunday 19 November 2006 08:12 am, Chris wrote:
> > Quick question maybe someone can answer. I'm trying to grep a number in a
> > group of messages in my maildir file. There are 4000 messages in this
> > folder and when running grep -l 20773 * I get an "Argument list too long"
> > which I've come to realize is because of the number of messages, in this
> > case, it has to look through. Is there a simple work around for this or
> > will I have to work in blocks of say, 1000?
>
> Rather than a for loop the best way to handle this is to use xargs().
> xargs() collects the list as input and doles it out in maximum argument
> list length pieces. The advantage of this is that you're not starting one
> copy of the command per argument but instead one for several hundred. In
> your case I'd use: "ls * | xargs grep -l 20773 /dev/null". The "/dev/null"
> is to make sure that the grep gets an argument. I'd likely use "find . |
> grep..." to depth search the tree from the current directory. I do that a
> lot from my home directory as I'm always losing stuff.
The "/dev/null" is not necessary, since xargs provides the argument to the
grep command.
cheers
Duncan
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