Hello,

instead of attempting "mv *.gz dest" one is asked to perform a "tar" or the directory or to execute "find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.gz" -exec mv {} inb/ \; " . I don't like that so much. The semantics were clearly expressed with the initial "mv *.gz dest" invocation. Instead, in analogy to tar, there should be an additional argument to mv that allows for the specification of a regular expression:

   $ mv --wildcards "*.gz" "inb"

Please, please, please ... the high-performance computing world will thank it you.

Steffen

Steffen Moeller wrote:

Note that the arglist limitation is a kernel limitation and not one in mv.

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#Argument-list-too-long

What kernel are you running?

Hmm...  That isn't a Debian version of coreutils.  But no matter.

You are forgetting about mv's --target-directory option.  It makes
things much easier and more efficient.

If you upgrade to a Linux kernel 2.6.23 or later such as 2.6.26 in
Debian Lenny Stable then you should find that the kernel limitation is
no longer present.  I imagine that Ubuntu would be the same.

Not really necessary.  Plus that is an undesirable program bloat.

Assuming that you are still running an older kernel can you please try
to recreate the problem on a newer kernel?

Bob