can't grep file

[ust3]

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

[Jeeshan]

did u try ll|grep argument?

[ust3]

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

[Stoner]

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..

[Ivan Ferreira]

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.