waling a directory with very many files

[Mel]

Piping the output of ls to less is a GUI-centric mentality?

Yeah. The "dump it on the user" idea, or more politely "can't decide
anything until the user has seen everything" is evident in the most
"characteristic" GUIs.

Mel.

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Yeah. The "dump it on the user" idea, or more politely "can't decide
anything until the user has seen everything" is evident in the most
"characteristic" GUIs.

Perhaps you're using different GUIs to me. In my experience, most GUIs
tend to *hide* data from the user rather than give them everything under
the sun.

The classic example is Windows, which hides certain files in the GUI file
manager even if you tell it to show all files.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Perhaps you're using different GUIs to me. In my experience, most GUIs
tend to *hide* data from the user rather than give them everything under
the sun.

Which is getting a bit away from what we're discussing here, but certainly
it is characteristic of GUIs to show you all 400,000 files in a directory,
or at least try to do so, and either hang for half an hour or run out of
memory and crash, rather than give you some intelligent way of prefiltering
the file display up front.

 

[Lie Ryan]

Which is getting a bit away from what we're discussing here, but certainly
it is characteristic of GUIs to show you all 400,000 files in a directory,
or at least try to do so, and either hang for half an hour or run out of
memory and crash, rather than give you some intelligent way of prefiltering
the file display up front.

In many debugging cases, you don't even know what to filter, which is
what I was referring to when I said "Even with glob and grep ..."

For example, when the problem mysteriously disappears when the file is
isolated

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In many debugging cases, you don't even know what to filter ...

So pick a random sample to start with. Do you know of a GUI tool that can do
that?