Filter needed for subsets of data

I'm an LDAP newbie.

I am trying to run a search command for LDAP data, retrieving a set of users for a specific organizationalUnit. However, some of these ou's have too many users, and I receive a "sizelimit exceeded" error. (This occurs at 500 records, but I can't convince the Powers That Be to increase the limit.)

My question is: How can I write a filter to retrieve only a subset of uid's? I'd love to retrieve only uid's that begin with letters A through E, then F through J, etc. Preferably as elegantly as possible.

Any help is welcome.

Hi and Welcome to Dev Shed

The only way I can think of is to query like: (|(ou=a*)(ou=b*)(ou=c*)(ou=d*)(ou=e*))
But this could put a larger strain on the server, hopefully you do have ou indexed with sub, otherwise you'll have to wait a long time.

Also make sure that you limit the scope to just the one tree level that will make it faster.

I'm resorting to using a case statement to assemble the filter. It looks something like this:
Its nasty, but on the good side I only have to run this script once. It's not a repeatable routine.

Thanks for the help.