First the explanation why your command failed: wildcards ('*', '?', etc.) are expanded not by the commands you write but by the shell before it calls the commands. Suppose you have 3 files in a directory, fileA, fileB and fileC. If you issue a command like:

Code:

/some/command *

The shell will first expand "*" to the names of all files, replace the asterisk with their names and then execute the resulting command line:

Code:

/some/command *                       # your commandline
/some/command fileA fileB fileC       # after expanding the asterisk

Now the commandline only allows for so many parameters to be passed to a command and if there are thousands or even millions of files the list might become quite huge - to big for the commandline. This has happened here and is the reason for ls to complain.

When you want to process such a lot of files you can use one of the following methods, both of which avoid the problem with the expanding wildcards:

First, you can use the fact that ls per default lists all filenames if no parameter is passed. That means ls * and ls do the same thing. Pass the output to a loop in which you work on your files:

Code:

ls | while read FILE ; do
     if [ -f "$FILE ] ; then     # only process files (i.e. not subdirs)
          command1 "$FILE"
          command2 "$FILE"
     fi
     [....]
done

This works fine, but only if you want to process every file in a certain directory and you do not want to recurse through many subdirectories. If you want to process files in all subdirectories from some path onwards this method falls short.

For such cases there is the find command. Use it to produce a list of directory entries based on many different attributes (file/dir/link/..., certain ranges of modification dates, ownerships, etc. - see the man page of find for details) and use its -exec clause to process each directory entry found that way.

For instance, the following moves every file with a name starting with "A" to a certain directory. The starting directory is searched recursively so that all its subdirectories are included in the search:

Code:

find /some/start/dir -type f -name "A*" -exec mv {} /other/dir \;

Instead of a simple command like mv you could also provide a script written by yourself to do more complex manipulations. The "{}" will be expanded to a single filename found by find and the script be called with that parameter once for every entry found that way.

I hope this helps.

bakunin