Arg list too long error? Here's a work-around.

[Dan Mercer]

In article <1990Nov16.001140.11923 at druid.uucp> darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
:In article <1990Nov14.192707.1099 at millipore.com> Jeff Lampert writes:
:> [...]
:>The 'find' command does'nt seem to have the 'Arg list' limitation.  It also
:>has the feature of being able to execute a command on the files that it finds.
:>So, by giving the command:
:>
:>find . -name "SRW*" -exec rm {} \;
:>
:>I was able to delete all the SRW files.
:> [...]
:>Hope this helps.  Any better ways?  Please E-Mail me.  Any way to aviod
:>recursion?  Again, please let me know...
:
:ls | grep '^SRW' | while read X
:do rm $i
:done
:
:-- 
:D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy at druid)     |
:D'Arcy Cain Consulting             |   I support gun control.
:West Hill, Ontario, Canada         |   Let's start with the government!
:+ 416 281 6094                     |


As a side issue,  get a load of this construct taken from a host
management utility (that not surprisingly failed with an
'ls - arg list too long' message

cd /etc;ls * | grep hosts >/dev/null 2>&1
if test $? -ne 0
then
echo /etc/hosts not found
exit 1
fi

This atrocity (instead of 'if test -f /etc/hosts ...') snuck by because
the QA guys started with a small set of environment variables whereas
I came in su'ed to root and I use about 1k of env variables.  I
eventually fixed the problem but bypassed it by clearing out my
environment space of all but essential variables.

As another aside,  take a look at this creation:

	grep -v parm_a filename |\
	grep -v parm_b |\
	grep -v parm_c |\
	grep -v parm_d |\
	grep -v parm_e |\
	grep -v parm_f |\
	grep -v parm_g |\
	grep -v parm_h |\
	grep -v parm_i |\
	grep -v parm_j |\
	grep -v parm_k |\
	grep -v parm_l |\
	grep -v parm_m |\
	grep -v parm_n |\
	grep -v parm_o |\
	grep -v parm_p |\
	grep -v parm_q |\
	grep -v parm_r \
	>/tmp/config$$

The intent was to remove a number of different parms from filename so
they could later be readded.  It blew up when it ran me out of
processes (we later found out that an application's de-installation
procedure munged our PROCS and NPROCS entries for the configuration -
gee,  thanks).  I,  of course,  had quite a few things running,
unlike the QA people who come in on a nice clean box.  It makes you
wonder what kind of numbskulls that put to work writing software -
with all the tools available to do this job - awk,  nawk, sed, ex,
egrep - they chose the most inappropriate tool and beat the hell out
of the box to get things done.  I replaced it with egrep

egrep -v 'parma_a|parm_b|...|parm_r' filename.

-- 
Dan Mercer
NCR Network Products Division      -        Network Integration Services
Reply-To: mercer at npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer)
"MAN - the only one word oxymoron in the English Language"