cat command 1

[3inen]

Hi!
I have 8700 html files in a folder totaling 8.7 Mb size. I tried using the shell command “cat” to merge them into one file such as combined.html, but I get the response

“-bash: /bin/cat: Argument list too long”

any perl way of doing this.

Thanks in advance

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Oh yes.
Perl should cope easily with that:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

foreach my $file (glob "*.html") {
  open FH, $file or die "Failed to open [$file]";
  print while(<FH>);
  close FH;
}

And redirect the output to your new output file.





(very injured) Trojan.

 

[3inen]

thanks! Trojan
just what i wanted.

cheers

 

[olded]

I know this is a Perl forum, but I'm wondering if limiting the number of arguments sent to /bin/cat using xargs would fix the problem. For example:

ls *.html | xargs -l56 cat

The above limits the number of arguments sent to cat at 56 which should prevent the overflow.

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Yep, sounds good to me.
Just remember though that windoze users would struggle with that.




(very injured) Trojan.