Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 12:58:40 +0200 From: Thomas Baker To: Cygwin Subject: grep - limited number of arguments? Message-ID: <20020626125840.A576@mail.gmd.de> Mail-Followup-To: Thomas Baker , Cygwin Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Now that there is a Korn shell for Cygwin, I am completing a switchover from MKS Toolkit, which takes a different, native-win32 approach that is (mostly) not compatible with Cygwin. One difficulty I have found, however, is limitations (or so it would seem) on the number of arguments that the command "grep" can take. In a directory I have with over 4300 files, "grep FOOBAR *" exits with: "bash: /usr/bin/grep: Invalid argument", though it can handle more limited searches (e.g., "grep FOOBAR 2000-12*"), and the MKS grep has no problem with grepping the entire directory, so it would appear to be a problem with handling arguments generally. The files in the directory are named with letters and numbers only, no spaces, and none longer than 40-50 characters. Have others found this as well, and are there workarounds? Tom -- Dr. Thomas Baker Thomas.Baker@bi.fhg.de Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven mobile +49-171-408-5784 Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft work +49-30-8109-9027 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619 -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/