topic Re: can't grep file in Operating System - Linux

can't grep file

ust3 — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:08:06 GMT

when I use grep , it pop the below message ,

"bash: /bin/grep: Argument list too long"

I know this is because there are too many files in directory, except use the command "find" , how to fix it ? is it because the memory is not enough to list all files ? if yes , how to change the parameter to increase the memory ? thx

Re: can't grep file

Jeeshan — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:16:28 GMT

did u try ll|grep argument?

Re: can't grep file

ust3 — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:25:31 GMT

thx reply ,

this error not only happen when use grep , sometimes it happens when I use ls , ll etc, so is there any method to fix it ? thx

Re: can't grep file

Stoner — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:53:27 GMT

As far as i know there are no memory-settings you can change to make it work.

What i do is to use find to reduce the numbers of files to work on.
Ex:
find . -name 'filename*' -exec grep text {} \;

this would search for text in all files starting with filename in the current directory.
Her you can combine the different arguments for find like mtime ctime etc etc..

Re: can't grep file

Ivan Ferreira — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:00:31 GMT

This happens when you have too many files in your directory. You can't avoid this. Use find and xargs commands to solve your problem.