From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Dec 24 15:13:24 2002
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Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 15:13:18 -0800
Subject: Re: Argument list too long: limitation in grep? bash? FreeBSD?
From: Kurt Bigler <kkb@breathhost.net>
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on 12/24/02 2:52 PM, Bill Moran <bill_moran2@hotmail.com> wrote:

>> From: paul beard <paulbeard@mac.com>
>> 
>> Bill Moran wrote:
>>> d/l the entire php documentation as individual html files.
>>> This equates to a LOT of files in a single directory (how can
>>> I get a count of this?)
>>> Anyway, I'm trying to find the docs on some features that
>>> the www.php.net's search isn't really helping on (searching
>>> for __FILE__ doesn't search for __FILE__ ... it searches for
>>> file, and there's too many results) so I try:
>>> grep __FILE__ *.html
>>> and I get the error:
>>> -bash: /usr/bin/grep: Argument list too long
>>> Is this a shortcoming of bash, grep or FreeBSD?  I'm assuming
>>> it's not grep, as the command:
>>> find . -name *.html -print | xargs grep __FILE__
>>> yeilds:
>>> -bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long
>> 
>> try grep "__FILE__" *.html.
> 
> Makes no difference, I get the same error.
> 
>> to get a file coun, 'ls | wc' might work.
> 
> That helped!  I've got >3000 files in that
> directory.

The success of the second item maybe gives a clue how to approach the first.
Maybe try something like this:

    ls | grep .html > temp

    edit temp to insert "grep " at the beginning of each line
        e.g. in vi use
            :%s/^/grep __FILE__ /

Now temp contains bunch of lines like:
    
    grep __FILE__ file1.html
    grep __FILE__ file2.html
    grep __FILE__ file3.html

Then chmod +x temp and execute it or use temp as input to your desired
shell.


HTH,
Kurt Bigler


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