Hi,
A few suggestions:
Try a couple of different shells - ksh, bash...
If that doesn't work try this instead:
find . -type f | xargs grep -l whatever
This has more chance since it's the file glob * that is busting your shell.
Cheers,
David.
At 18:29 19/11/2006, Chris wrote:
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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
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