Question

I am a totally newbie to Linux and perl. there is a perl script on one of our linux box which downloads daily generated log files from another linux machine. this script was stopped two months ago and now when I am trying to run it again, it is giving “Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 550 Arguments too long” error, I looked up for files onto the source machine and found that there are around 36000~ log files have been created so far.

For test purpose
1.) I used linux ftp command to connect to source machine and list the files using ls which was successful.
2.) I also logged into the source machine and ran ls command into the log files directory and it was successfully listing the files.

can anyone please advise why this the case with perl script which is getting 550 error code from server for listing those files?

Below is the debug log Trace of perl script which we are using to download files :-

Net::FTP>>> Net::FTP(2.77)
Net::FTP>>>   Exporter(5.58)
Net::FTP>>>   Net::Cmd(2.28)
Net::FTP>>>   IO::Socket::INET(1.31)
Net::FTP>>>     IO::Socket(1.30)
Net::FTP>>>       IO::Handle(1.27)
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 220 hostname.server FTP server (Version wu-2.6.2-5-ncx-1 Wed Jun 29 14:53:11 CEST 2005) ready.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)>>> USER USR
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 331 Password required for USR.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)>>> PASS ....
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 230 User USR logged in.  Access restrictions apply.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)>>> CWD /backup
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 250 CWD command successful.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)>>> PORT 192,168,1,154,217,0
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 200 PORT command successful.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)>>> NLST
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 550 Arguments too long
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)>>> QUIT
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 221-You have transferred 0 bytes in 0 files.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 221-Total traffic for this session was 393 bytes in 0 transfers.
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 221-Thank you for using the FTP service on hostname.server
    Net::FTP=GLOB(0x87423fc)<<< 221 Goodbye.

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

This typically means that the results of the NLST command ( i.e. ls ) are larger than some pre-configured threshold for your library.