Help with bash script

Question

Hi
There are many times when I need to perform a find or du command on server data hierarchy. Often the recursion goes to many depths so the number of items is too large, i.e. command returns 'Argument list too long'.
So I usually break it into letters, A-C, D-F, etc. However, now I want to write a script to cycle through all top-level folders from A to Z.
I thought this might work
for l in ${ABCDE...}; do
echo $l
done
but it doesn't.
Can anyone please help me with correct syntax?
Cheers
C

Answer 1

How about
<pre> find / -depth 1 -prune -type d</pre>
If I need to process a lot of file names returned by 'find' I tend to use the following approaches:
<pre> find /dir/path -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep regexp</pre>
where the ls -l is just an example of a shell command and xargs will append file names after the ls command.
<pre> find /dir/path -name "*.c" | while read file
do
echo $file
done</pre>
where the echo is just an example of something to do with the file name.