In long recursive copies, where you descend into many levels of diretories, you can quickly run out of file descriptors. The number of file descriptors is a resource which you can often set in the shell. It is a good idea to set this limit to a large number on a host which will be copying a lot of files. For instance, in the C shell you would write,
limit descriptors 1024
Most systems should have adequate defaults for this parameter, but on some systems it appears to be set to a low value such as 64, which is not sufficient for large recursive tree searches.
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