> On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, James wrote: > > It is necessary for running a command on all files matching a > > pattern. > On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 11:04:30AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > i'm pretty sure that's not true. > > […] > > $ echo /* | wc -c > 119 > $ echo /*/* | wc -c > 159988 > $ echo /*/*/* | wc -c > 688989 > $ echo /*/*/*/* | wc -c > 3882671 It is. In the examples above you're likely inadvertently using a shell builtin, rather than an external process. Try /usr/bin/echo. > > Wildcarding substitutes the full file names of each matching result > > of the wildcard on the command line. Thousands of matching > > names/paths can easily blow up the buffer. > > but that's the very point i was making ... that once upon a time, > there was limited space to construct a command before running it but, > these days, that limit is clearly much larger. Still not large enough. > i'm fairly sure i can conclude that a command can be at least 3882671 > characters long, can i not? Let's distinguish between commands and external processes. The former one is something to look into further. Regards, Alex Pilon