[TriLUG] Limit to command line arguments?

Owen Berry oberry at trilug.org
Sat Oct 22 21:46:14 EDT 2005


If the *.CAD is in single quotes ('*.CAD') the shell won't do the
expansion.

Owen

On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 14:36 -0400, Rick DeNatale wrote:
> On 10/22/05, Warren Myers <volcimaster at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Can you do something along the lines of <progname> *.CAD?
> 
> I don't think that that will help. Unlike Windows where programs are
> expected to expand file wildcards internally, *nix shells do that work
> for the program.
> 
> The shell expands globs before it calls a command,  so
> progname *.CAD
> 
> gets expanded to:
> 
> progname f1.CAD ...    f300.CAD
> 
> which will overflow any command buffer/argument count limit just as if
> you'd typed the arguments yourself.
> 
> I've seen situations where ls * failed in a directory with a lot of files.
> 
> --
> Rick DeNatale
> 
> Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site
> http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/




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