From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 16 16:34:18 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 05BCC37B4C5 for ; Thu, 16 Nov 2000 16:34:14 -0800 (PST) Received: (from bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) id eAH0YBa20941; Thu, 16 Nov 2000 16:34:11 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 16:34:11 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein To: Sebastiaan van Erk Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: argument list too long Message-ID: <20001116163411.F18037@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <00111700205500.61931@shalimar.net.au> <20001116145641.A22842@sebster.com> <20001116105654.G830@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001116231731.A14470@c187104187.telekabel.chello.nl> <20001116143843.S830@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001117000816.B15150@c187104187.telekabel.chello.nl> <20001116152421.A18037@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001117004239.A3656@sebster.com> <20001116154822.B18037@fw.wintelcom.net> <20001117011559.B3656@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: <20001117011559.B3656@sebster.com>; from sebster@sebster.com on Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 01:15:59AM +0100 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * Sebastiaan van Erk [001116 16:16] wrote: > > xargs splits something up into multiple processes; so xargs is _not_ > the solution to passing a long lists of arguments to a single process. That's why most programs take configuration files. > I'm just brainstorming here a little bit on what I think is a silly > restriction which I'm sure has it's historical reasons. And instead > of conceding that it would be BETTER to have argument lists be any > length, and it being BETTER to pass argument lists from file, > all I hear is "it's silly to try that, because it doesn't work". > It's the "lets keep it broke" attitude instead of a "let's fix it" > attitude that bothers me. It's not broken. > Basically, it's IMPOSSIBLE to write a library to do what I want to do, > because there's no way that I can get an unlimited number of args to > a program that doesn't have a --args-from option. So this is a > fundamental limitation of the OS. No, it's a fundamental limition of reality, not the OS. -- -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