From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 16 14:31:53 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B901C37B479 for ; Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:31:50 -0800 (PST) Received: (from bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) id eAGMVmX16897; Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:31:48 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:31:48 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein To: Sebastiaan van Erk Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: argument list too long Message-ID: <20001116143148.R830@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <20001116091607.A97857@sebster.com> <00111621362707.00522@shalimar.net.au> <20001116122313.A69018@sebster.com> <00111700205500.61931@shalimar.net.au> <20001116145641.A22842@sebster.com> <20001116105654.G830@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001116230834.A59437@sebster.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20001116230834.A59437@sebster.com>; from sebster@sebster.com on Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 11:08:34PM +0100 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * Sebastiaan van Erk [001116 14:08] wrote: > Alfred Perlstein wrote: > > > Can you please suggest a reasonable limit to the argument list? > > I cannot, because as my previous mails clearly indicated, any limit is in > my opinion not reasonable. > > > Would a gigabyte work for you? > > maybe. > > See above. > > > Will that cover all mega-long arg lists? > > no. > > Indeed. Exactly right. It won't! > > > Solution: > > use xargs. > > Nope. Again, this is not a solution, it's a workaround. Solution: infinite > lists. They have them in all major programming languages. At least, they're > as big as you need them to be, if you have enough hardware. :-) When was the last time you worked on a machine with inifinite resources? This is bogus, there has to be a limit, if that's 100bytes, 100k, 100megs or 100gigs. If you can't cope with a limit and batch the commands then your program/script is broken. Use the tools that are available, yes it's a workaround, but it's necessary if you expect your tools to work on machines without inifinite resources. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org] "I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message