Argument list too long.

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Thu Sep 11 15:41:35 UTC 2003


On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Mike A. Harris wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Dag Wieers wrote:
>
> >I'm not in favor to increase it to 64 per se, but at least something 
> >higher than 32 (as I've already come across this boundary at several 
> >occassions where the only solution was to work around it in a bad way).
> 
> man xargs

Seems plausible but unpractical in some situations. Eg. you're resigning
thousands of files, too long for the argument list. Doing it one by one 
would force you to enter your passphrase a thousand times.

You could split it up like the document says, but even that will make it 
harder (there's no guarantee that [a-n] will not be too long). Or you 
could starting to write an expect script that enters your passphrase... 
Sure.

But the easiest solution IMO would be to increase the size so that it 
doesn't occur that often in practice.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]





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