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Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 17:58:18 +0300
From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To: Henrik W Lund <henrik.w.lund@broadpark.no>
Message-ID: <20040618145818.GA20561@orion.daedalusnetworks.priv>
References: <1e3201c45522$c393f840$dc96eed5@maslak>
	<40D2D095.1080702@broadpark.no>
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cc: Yavuz Ma?lak <bmalik@ihlas.net.tr>
cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: copy or listing problem
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On 2004-06-18 13:23, Henrik W Lund <henrik.w.lund@broadpark.no> wrote:
> Yavuz Ma?lak wrote:
> >Hello
> >I use freebsd4.9
> >I have thousands of files in my any directory. and I need to copy them to 
> >another directory. but when I started to copy them I got error as below;
> >/bin/cp: Argument list too long.

> You could do it with a shell script:
> 
> [SOF]
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> for file in *
> do
> 	if [ -f "$file" ]
> 	then
> 		cp "$file" "$target_dir" #Define $target_dir yourself
> 	fi
> done
> [EOF]

Please note that this is very likely to fail at the expansion of
`for file in *' in very much the same way as `cp *' fails.

A better alternative is to start copying one level up or use xargs(1):

    find . -maxdepth 1 | xargs -J '@' cp -Rp '@' /destination/path

or something similar.

- Giorgos