That's right. I tested this just now in a directory with 1,000,000 files: $ for i in *; do echo $i; done | wc -l 1000000 I'm a little bummed that it faile

That's right. I tested this just now in a directory with 1,000,000 files: $ for i in *; do echo $i; done | wc -l 1000000 I'm a little bummed that it failed in fish shell, but wouldn't begrudge the author if they replied "don't do that".