Re: [LUG] chown....

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Weaver wrote:
> If you have ~ 20,000 files in the directory (bash will only allow up to x
> [4096?] arguments. * might not work in that case either though.)

Most Unix's baulk at commands lines in excess of about 20,000
characters.

This included wildcard expansion for "ls *" may fail where "ls"
works fine.

Not sure about Linux's Bash. The POSIX standard requires a
minimum maximum line length which is just over 20,000 characters
if I recall correctly.

Solaris has a 4MB limit I think, how they got from 20K to 4MB,
without just going to 4GB I don't know.

xargs can be a useful command when doing these kind of things to
reduce the number of processes created and to handle long lists
of arguments from tools like "find".

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