Question

When I type this at shell prompt:

grep -r  "ambiguously" .

I get the error:

grep: line too long.

Basically the current directory is a log directory and I am trying to locate the sql error ‘Column ambiguously defined’ in all the log files.

But why do I get the error? The files are very huge in size, is that the main reason?

Answer 1

You should try

find -type f -exec grep PATTERN {} +

The command line limitation can be found on linux with

$ getconf ARG_MAX

On *BSD with

$ sysctl kern.argmax

See http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/argument-list-too-long-error-solution/ to go further.