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

[Daniel Robitaille]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:16 PM, R. Wood <rw at ncf.ca> wrote:
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>> > > > "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.
>
>
> I wonder if using 'find' followed by either '-exec' or 'xargs' is a
> workaround for the 'cp/mv' limitation?
>

yes that should work.


-- 
Daniel Robitaille