topic Re: Arguments too long in Operating System - HP-UX

Arguments too long

LawrenceLow — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:10:21 GMT

Hi there,

Apparently I keep recieve an error message when I try to copy some files to other directory.

/% cp /export1/uw/ECM/images/BGIR2093*.txt /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images
Arguments too long.

Please assist.

Re: Arguments too long

Laurent Menase — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:26:46 GMT

for i in /export1/uw/ECM/images/BGIR2093*.txt
do
cp $i /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images
done

Or
ls /export1/uw/ECM/images/BGIR2093*.txt | xargs -i -t cp {} /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images

Re: Arguments too long

Matti_Kurkela — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 08:15:05 GMT

> for i in /export1/uw/ECM/images/BGIR2093*.txt

This "for" command line has the same risk of being too long after wildcard expansion as the original cp command.

The trick is to use "find" and pass any necessary wildcards to it in quotes, so they won't be expanded by the shell.

But the "find" command looks into sub-directories too, so you should verify it does what you want before actually making it do anything that's difficult to undo:

find /export1/uw/ECM/images -name 'BGIR2093*.txt' -exec echo cp {} /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images/ \+

This should display a list of (probably very long) "cp" commands. If the commands look OK, just remove the "echo" in the middle and the cp commands will be actually executed, instead of displayed.

Limiting "find" to a single directory in a portable way may be tricky:
http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/find/

MK

Re: Arguments too long

Dennis Handly — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:18:18 GMT

>Matti: -exec echo cp {} /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images/ \+

Unfortunately you can't use {} with + except last. You'll need to create a script that reverses the first parm with the last:
find ... -exec cp_reverse /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images/ {} +
#!/usr/bin/sh
target=$1
shift
cp "$@" "$target"

>Laurent: ls /export1/uw/ECM/images/BGIR2093*.txt | xargs

This will also fail. You need to add add grep to the pipeline and you would have to cd to that directory:
cd /export1/uw/ECM/images
ls | grep "\.txt$" | xargs ...

Also if you cd to the directory, you may be able to use:
cp BGIR2093*.txt /export1/uw/ECM/backup/images