*BSD News Article 27232


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!paladin.american.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!yeshua.marcam.com!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft
From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Strange response for ls
Date: 11 Feb 1994 15:20:17 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Feb11102017@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
References: <11FEB94.11065104@tifrvax.tifr.res.in>
NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu
In-reply-to: bhiksha@tifrvax.tifr.res.in's message of Fri, 11 Feb 1994 11:06:51 GMT


In article <11FEB94.11065104@tifrvax.tifr.res.in>
bhiksha@tifrvax.tifr.res.in writes:

   I do an ls /a/b/c/*/m*/*.x
   and i get
   /bin/ls: Argument too long.

   This file system is on a cd, and running the same command on a sun
   gives a list about 3500 files long.

   Im running NetBSD 0.9, on a 486/66

Under 386BSD 0.1 and NetBSD 0.8-0.9, the argument list for a process
is limited to 20k by execve(); if you give it something longer than
that, it barfs with the above error.  This limit is increased to 256k
in NetBSD-current.

   I forgot to mention that the ls takes a looong time before it gives
   me the above response.

Actually, it's the shell, since that's what does the globbing, and it
is hardly surprising that it takes a long while, considering it has to
stat(2) every file.

   And the file system is an NFS mounted system.

Even worse.

--
- Charles Hannum
  NetBSD group
  Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sparc, mac68k, pc532.
  In progress: pmax, sun3.