The shell will attempt to expand '\*' into arguments before it spawns the 'echo'... | Hacker News

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		joblessjunkie on Aug 16, 2011 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: You can list a directory containing 8 million file... The shell will attempt to expand '*' into arguments before it spawns the 'echo' process. The shell cannot handle long argument lists, so this will fail rather quickly.

smackfu on Aug 16, 2011 [–]

Yep, this is usually the first point of failure for commands acting on somewhat large directories, that drives people to use find and exec.

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