PS re google

[Brendan McKay]

* Michele Dondi <blazar at pcteor1.mi.infn.it> [050120 20:50]:
> On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, N. J. A. Sloane wrote:
> 
> >By the way, i should say in my defense that the reason the improvements
> >did not work was (I believe) caused by the following problem with Unix.
> >
> >If you try to execute
> >
> >    ls oeis* | ...
> >
> >and there are too many files oeis*, you get an error message
> >
> >    Arg list too long
> 
> Indeed it's not the 'ls oesi*' part that is causing any problem, but the 
> '...' one. This is why in these situations it's customary to do
> 
>   ls oeis* | while read f; do ...; done
> that reads line by line (if that is applicable - and I think so).

This information is not correct! The problem is that (most editions
of) Unix allow a fixed maximum amount of memory for parameter lists
of processes. It is a kernel configuration parameter.

Brendan.