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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.