CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxperlcommand
jake
jake

Reputation: 105

Perl command not executing because of too many arguments, how can I fix it to allow more arguments?

I am trying to use this command:

perl -i -p -e "s/\r//" ./{folderName}/*.txt

The problem is I have a lot of .txt files within this folder and I guess the command cannot handle it... Is there something else I can try or do to fix this?

The error I get is: "Argument list too long"

I've used this command successfully with smaller folder sizes (less .txt files) and it works fine.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 343

Answers (2)

Gaurav Wadhone
Gaurav Wadhone

Reputation: 144

There is limit on input argument on shell. This can be find by running below command.

getconf ARG_MAX

If argument number are more then you can use other methods like pipe or for loop.

as example 

for txt in ./{folderName}/*.txt ; do perl -i -p -e "s/\r//" "$txt"; done

or using pipe

echo ./{folderName}/*.txt | xargs perl -i -p -e "s/\r//"

explanation for echo as @ikegami raised why echo won't give "too many argument"

reason is echo is builtin command and don't pass arguments to new process.

Upvotes: 4

ikegami
ikegami

Reputation: 385506

GNU:

find {folder_name} -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -exec perl -i -pe's/\r//' {} +

More portable:

find {folder_name} -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -print | xargs perl -i -pe's/\r//'

echo {folder_name}/*.txt | xargs perl -i -pe's/\r//'

find {folder_name} -maxdepth 1 -name '*.txt' -exec perl -i -pe's/\r//' {} \;

Notes

  • None of the solutions support a {folder_name} that start with -.

  • The first two portable solutions don't support file names with some special characters in them. (But it's unlikely that you'll find those characters in file names in the first place.)

  • The GNU solution and the first two portable solutions pass as many file names to perl as possible (minimizing the number of times perl is launched), while the third portable solution launches a perl process for every parameter.

  • echo is a shell builtin, so it's not subject to the system's limit on the number of parameters passed to utilities.

Upvotes: 3

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