Hello Chloe K: It's actually working very well. In your first command it's telling you you have many many files. Much more than the internal buffers of ls can process. Try the following: find . -maxdepth 1 -print | sort | more find . -maxdepth 1 -name "<wildcard of your filespec>" -print | sort | more Example: find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.db" -print | sort | more Hope this helps. Regards, Lou <div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 23, 2007 10:54 AM, chloe K <<a href="mailto:chloekcy2000@yahoo.ca">chloekcy2000@yahoo.ca</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi My ls command not works properly Are there many files problem? [host]# ls -al |wc -l 55264 [host]# ls -al *.db |more -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long [host]# ls -al * -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long [host]# ls -al *.* -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long <div class="WgoR0d"> <hr size="1"> <a href="http://ca.promos.yahoo.com/newmail/overview2/" target="_blank">All new Yahoo! Mail - </a> <hr size="1">Get a sneak peak at messages with a handy reading pane.</div> -- fedora-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-list@redhat.com">fedora-list@redhat.com</a> To unsubscribe: <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list" target="_blank"> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list</a> </blockquote></div>