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Date:      Thu, 16 Nov 2000 23:49:38 +0100
From:      Sebastiaan van Erk <sebster@sebster.com>
To:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: argument list too long
Message-ID:  <20001116234938.A75489@sebster.com>
In-Reply-To: <20001116143148.R830@fw.wintelcom.net>; from bright@wintelcom.net on Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 02:31:48PM -0800
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>

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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?
 
> 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.

The program would be coping just fine by saying "out of memory". If it's
REALLY fancy, it'd probably say "out of memory, insert some more if
you would like to continue this operation". It's better than saying,
"geez, it looks like I have 200MB of memory left, and about 80GB of hard
drive space, but I think I'll arbitrarily restrict the length of that
argument list to say, 64K. That's a good old archaic power of 2, I like
it. Too bad if you don't."

> 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.

Greetings,
Sebastiaan van Erk


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