Question about transfering DVD Package files to /var...

[Daniel Robitaille]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Tony Yarusso <tonyyarusso at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "too long of a list" for what?  Is cp actually throwing an error that
>> it can't handle such things?  Or are you just running out of disk space
>> / patience?
>>
>>
>>>The Disk is 320 Gigs, I'm using about 99 Gigs of it, and there are
>> about 87 Gigs left for Ubuntu 9.04. So I'm not running out of Disk
>> Space. cp is actually throwing out the error, even when there are just
>> about 2000 Package Files to Copy or Move over, instead of 26,939, it
>> says the list is too long.
>
> Now that's darn interesting.  I had no idea cp had a file number
> limit.  (ln and such are still better routes, but just for fun I'd
> venture that the only way around this is a shell script to split it
> into

I ran into these type of problems in the past with cp and rm.  I think
it comes from the star that the shell must expands into an actual list
of filenames to pass to the command; at one point it gets too long.  I
don't think it is a limit on the number of files, but it is a limit on
the number of characters of all these filenames lined up together.



-- 
Daniel Robitaille