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Date:      Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:56:03 -0800
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To:        Sebastiaan van Erk <sebster@sebster.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: argument list too long
Message-ID:  <20001116145603.A17551@fw.wintelcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <20001116234938.A75489@sebster.com>; from sebster@sebster.com on Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 11:49:38PM %2B0100
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> <20001116143148.R830@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001116234938.A75489@sebster.com>

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* Sebastiaan van Erk <sebster@sebster.com> [001116 14:49] wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> 
> > When was the last time you worked on a machine with inifinite
> > resources?
> 
> What was the last time you had to recompile a program when you added
> another hard disk. So they could cope with the fact that you had new 
> bigger limits?

As I just mentioned, there's a way to read the max arg size.

sysctl kern.argmax

Read it and have your program cope with it, it's better than having
a non-readable memory dependant limit based on the amount of RAM
in your box and fail at weird times because you've exhasted it.

> > 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.
> 
> I'm not saying you ever have infinite resources, on the contrary, I'm just
> saying you should be limited by your resources and not by your program.

You're making some fragile programs without reading enough
documentation to avoid it.  This isn't the kernel's fault, if you
could provide a case besides a poorly written shell script as to
why the arglist needs to be any larger or smaller perhaps I could
do something for you.

I'm not changing the arglist, I'm just shaking my head at your
way of thinking.

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]
"I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk."


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