The for loop only runs resize once per file. So no, the entire directory does not get splatted. It is unlikely you'd hit maximum command length. At least on ma

The for loop only runs resize once per file. So no, the entire directory does not get splatted. It is unlikely you'd hit maximum command length. At least on mac, the max command length is 1048576 bytes, while the maximum path length in the home directory is 1024 bytes. There might be some unix variant where the max path length is close enough to the max command length to cause an overflow, but I doubt that is the case for common ones. xargs exists in an attempt to be able to parse command output. You could for instance have awk output xargs formatted file names to build up a single command invocation from arbitrary records read by awk. Note that xargs still has to obey the command line length limit though, because the command line needs to get passed to the program. Thus, in a situation where this for loop overflows the command line, it would cause xargs to also fail. Thus I would always use globbing if I have the choice. EDIT: If you mean that the directory is splatted in the for loop, then in a theoretical sense it is. However, since "for" is a shell builtin, it does not have to care about command line length limits to my knowledge.