"0403-027 The parameter list is too long" when running command "l 1

[yuroy]

Hi All,
I'm getting this error when running the command "ls *" or "rm *":
"ksh: /usr/bin/ls: 0403-027 The parameter list is too long."

Has anyone encountered this before?

thanks in advance for the help.

 

[aixmurderer]

Yip, you have more than 2048 files (I think that's the amount) in the directory. IBM Certified Specialist - MQSeries
IBM Certified Specialist - AIX 5 pSeries System Administration

 

[yuroy]

hi,
yes, there are more than 2048 files in the directory. But we never encountered this error with Solaris or HP-UX.

Is there a solution for this in AIX? We're on AIX4.3.3.

many thanks.

 

[gheist]

Yes - in AIX 5.1 (-: you can specify up to 128x4K for ARG/ENV list

Workaround is - splitting your jobs or parsing filename arguments from find ie

find . -name databackup | cpio -???
or
| xargs echo

or something like that

 

[Yegolev]

You will have to get creative to get around this one. Happens to me occasionally. I try to do something besides "ls *", such as just "ls". The shell expands the asterisk into a list, so you can probably get by that in a ls just by omitting the *. When you do a "ls" I think it just streams the dir listing to STDOUT, but I could be wrong.

 

[Einstein47]

Another solution is to use the find command to send the list of files to ls. Use this:

find . -ls

This way you can also control the RE of which files to display. Using the -name attribute:

find . -name "*.log" -ls

There are a ton more attributes by which you can filter using find. It is worth it to know this command. Einstein47
(Love is like PI - natural, irrational, endless, and very important.)

 

[Yegolev]

At one of the maint levels, IBM changed awk to accept 999 args instead of just 99, after much complaining on our part.

 

[yuroy]

thanks all for the suggestions.
hope IBM will release a patch for this rather than users having to work around this.

 

[Yegolev]

You can nag a lot, but don't hold your breath. =)