* fails - too many files - what to do?

[iggystar]

Ok I knew the solution to this problem a year ago and now I forget it.

I have a folder the gets heaps and heaps of little itty bitty files everytime a program we have gets run.

There are so many files, in fact, that any command I use that has a * in it fails. I can't tar them, rm *, gzip them, cat them, grep them, etc.

Last time I had this problem there was another little unix comand I would run first and then pipe the results into the command I really wanted to run and that made all my problems go away.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Can anybody think of a better suggestion for handling a directory with heaps of files?

I'm running on RH Linux 7 if that matters at all.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[aixmurderer]

I thing you are probably looking for the &quot;echo *|xargs <command>&quot; string. IBM Certified Specialist - MQSeries
IBM Certified Specialist - AIX 5 pSeries System Administration