-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday 19 November 2006 10:23 am, 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. > That seems to give me the same output as first noted:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] cur]$ ls * | xargs grep -l 20773 /dev/null bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long [EMAIL PROTECTED] cur]$ ls * | xargs grep -l 20773 bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long The tiny script that Hal provided worked just fine for my needs which was looking for a certain ASN in over 4000 messages. - -- Chris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFFYKKT43Kn2pjmcFwRAsW+AJ93qIQM+Uka6GTkE76Do93Pp0RbUQCeL+Kx SJ/VRCLcoOThCPFirA0c+24= =exzs -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from Mandriva? Go to http://store.mandriva.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrivaclub.com ____________________________________________________
