billions of files, ext3, reiser, and ls -aly

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 03:20:19AM -0500, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
>>   If the command is 'ls -al' you will not get a 'too many arguments'
>>   error, because there are not too many arguments; there are none
>>   besides the options. If you use 'ls -al *' you may, and it depends
>>   on the system (glibc may be part of it) and how many arguments (and
>>   possibly the maximum length of the arguments).
>
> The shell will have a command line limit usually.  I think older
> versions of bash it was 32768 characters, but I think it is more like
> 128000 now.  Not sure.  I almost never exceed it, and when I do I know
> how to use find and xargs.  Almost certainly the limit depends on the
> libc, the version of the shell, and various other factors.

    The shell's limit depends on available memory. I've had command
    lines with a million arguments and millions of characters.

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ===================================================================
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists