[GRLUG] globbing

Bob Kline bob.kline at gmail.com
Thu Oct 4 10:41:19 EDT 2012


BASH being GNU's version of the shell, I'd
of thought the limit would be humongous.
As I mentioned, Stallman advocated decades
ago that programs use word lengths as limits.
In 1980 that would have been 8 and 16 bits
for PCs, but of course those didn't run Unix
yet.  But 32-bit machines running Unix did
start to appear about 25 years ago.  32-bits
is a big limit, and today, 64-bits ought to
hold everybody....

Anyway, the support person mentioned the
package FileZilla.  If that uses xargs, then
yes, I agree that is the way to go.  It then
probably gets around globbing altogether.
FTP works fine, even while it's 40 years old,
but for that feature, which I think is outdated
in its implementation.  Perhaps globbing
doesn't scale well at some point.

I'd still prefer an ssh connection, but that
doesn't seem available, at least on low
budget hosting plans like mine.....

   -- Bob


On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Steve Romanow <slestak989 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think this is pretty typical on all the unix's I am aware of.  The shell
> is just a program, and the developer had to choose a size for how long a
> command to accept and parse.
>
> When globbing, it is easy to pass this limit.  The xargs solution the
> support person mentioned is the default answer IMO.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20121004/030761ac/attachment.html>


More information about the grlug mailing list