👀 Views: 24 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

bash ubuntu scripting

I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I'm running a Bash script on Ubuntu 22.04 that processes a large number of log files in a directory. The script is designed to concatenate all `.log` files into a single file and then perform a search operation on it. However, I am working with the behavior `bash: Argument list too long`. I suspect this is due to the shell command attempting to handle too many files at once when using a wildcard. Here’s the relevant part of my script: ```bash #!/bin/bash output_file="combined_logs.log" # Clear previous output file > "$output_file" # Attempting to concatenate all log files cat *.log >> "$output_file" # Searching for a specific term grep "behavior" "$output_file" ``` This script works fine with a few log files, but when I have hundreds of them (which is common in my case), I hit the argument limit. I tried splitting the concatenation into smaller batches by using a loop, but I'm not sure how to implement that effectively without making the script too complex. I’ve read about using `find` and `xargs`, but I’m not sure how to apply that in this scenario. Here’s what I’ve tried so far, which didn’t resolve the scenario: ```bash find . -name "*.log" -exec cat {} + >> "$output_file" ``` This command appears to run without behavior, but doesn’t combine the logs as expected. Could someone suggest a better approach to handle this situation or a more efficient way to concatenate a large number of files? Any tips on how to avoid hitting the argument limit would be greatly appreciated! I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. Thanks for taking the time to read this!