literally millions of files

when i have them all in a directory, GNU tools choke on my ram
so what is /comp/s way to deal with a wikipedia dump of 15 million files ?

>>16,17
HAHAHA. Troll? Try the truth. Try reading this transcript by the creator of GNU. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html
If you don't want to bother, search for the section that says
And that word is of course GNU, which stands for ``Gnu's Not Unix''.