From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jan 5 3:19:51 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from scaup.prod.itd.earthlink.net (scaup.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A31F837B41D for ; Sat, 5 Jan 2002 03:19:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from pool0024.cvx22-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.198.24] helo=mindspring.com) by scaup.prod.itd.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 16MorT-0002WY-00; Sat, 05 Jan 2002 03:19:39 -0800 Message-ID: <3C36E14B.1FF8523C@mindspring.com> Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2002 03:19:39 -0800 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Miller Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Overriding ARG_MAX References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG David Miller wrote: > > Probably, you are doing something whic you aren't telling us, > > like saying "ls *.c | wc -l" or otherwise using globbing that > > the shell expands to too large a list. > > > > The easy answer is "use ``find'' instead of ``ls''". > > Indeed, but it doesn't answer the basic questions, which was: Is there any > easy way to override ARG_MAX (or arbitrary other paramaters) in make.conf > or a config file, or something else altogether? No, there is no easy way. The limit is there in the POSIX standard, and it exists because of the need to pass data from a parent to a child over a fork + exec. The correct answer is to use "find", and either pipe or call "xargs" on the output. No matter what you do, you are going to not overcome the limit on programs that are already built (like your shell), which includded the header file and referenced the manifest constant where the limit is defined. So compatability with exiting binary apoplications already limits any change you might want to make to this. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message