Filemanagement

[William Park]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 10:10:46PM -0500, John Wildberger wrote:
> 
> > > With this explanation I will have to revise my understanding of the
> > > mechanics in the execution of the command   cat *.pgn > newfile.
> > > Are all the *.pgn files first listed on one line before they are passed
> > > into newfile??
> >
> >    The shell expands the wildcard and passes the list to the command.
>
> With  just two files a.pgn and b.pgn the command line for cat *.pgn > newfile 
> will then be expanded to cat a.pgn b.pgn > newline. 
> Therefore the CLI limit will be affected by the sum of the filename length and 
> not by the content of the files. Did I get this right ???

File content is never involved.  Bash can handle unlimited number of
arguments, since it uses linear linked list to hold the arguments.  Line
length limit comes from globbing routine in underlying OS (ie. glibc).

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>
Linux solution for data processing and document management.
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