ls fails with saying "Arguments list too long!"

[jkhatri]

Hi Everybody,

I have to do ls -al *.eob files but 'ls' is failing
becuase there is nearly 10000 files in the directory and I assume ls is not able to handle that large volume.

Will appreciate if anybody has a solution for this problem.

Thanks

Jyo

 

[MikeLacey]

hi,

yes, it's because the pattern *.eob is matching more files than the shell can pass to ls

in the past I've gotten around this by matching the files in several passes

ls a*.eob
ls b*.eob
..
..
ls z*.eob
Mike
"Experience is the comb that Nature gives us after we are bald."

Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.

 

[KenCunningham]

I wonder whether find suffers the same limitation?:

find . -name '*.eob' -exec ls -la {} \;

Then again, you could always prune the directory in question! HTH.

 

[toolkit]

Ken, you are right: find does not suffer like ls.