Could ARG_MAX be increased?

Ceri Davies ceri at submonkey.net
Thu Sep 23 06:59:24 PDT 2004


On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 04:54:56PM +0300, Putinas Piliponis wrote:
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> > [mailto:owner-freebsd-current at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Cyrille Lefevre
> > Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 4:47 PM
> > To: Juha Saarinen; freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> > Subject: Re: Could ARG_MAX be increased?
> > 
> > "Juha Saarinen" <juhasaarinen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Currently, ARG_MAX is set to:
> > > 
> > > $ getconf ARG_MAX
> > > 65536
> > >  
> > > in syslimits.h. This is quite low compared to other OS (SunOS has 1MB
> > > IIRC, and OpenBSD 3.5 256K) and causes the "argument list too long"
> > > issues when for instance grep'ing in directories with lots of files.
> > 
> > 
> > how about grep -r ou find | xargs grep !
> > 
> 
> but this is workaround - isn't it ? 

Well yes, but you need to know how to workaround this.  Otherwise, what
happens when you hit ARG_MAX limit?  You lobby the developer of that
system to up the number and then upgrade?

Ceri
-- 
It is not tinfoil, it is my new skin.  I am a robot.
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