UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all

I have more than 1000 files in a folder and when ever i use a "compress" or "zcat" command it give error
/bin/zcat: Arg list too long. .

any solution for this

Pipe to xargs

e.g.

Code:

find ./dir | xargs zcat

Obviously you'll need to modify this to sort your needs.

If you need more help you'll need to provide a lot more information as to what you're trying to achieve.

Cheers
ZB

ok the details are as follow :-

if the number of files in perticular directory are less thn 900 then the cat, zcat or compress commands are working fine.

but when the number is greater then 1000 and i use any of the above cmd it give me mentioned error.

is there any parameter tht can be changed ??

MB

Certain commands have a limit on the number of parameters that can be passed.

When you type (for example) "zcat ./*.gz" what's happening is the shell is expanding this to "zcat file1.gz file2.gz ... filen.gz" before it's executed, thus passing a long list of filenames to the zcat command.

You'll need to use xargs as I described in my previous post to get around this limitation.

Cheers
ZB