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 ?

lol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_operating_system
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html

Its name is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix; it was chosen because its design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and by not containing any Unix code.