argument list too long

[Erik Norgaard]

Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> what is a limit of amount of arguments passed to program? is it 
> hardwired or can be changed.
> 
> i found it to be in order of few thousands parameteres

searching google results in an article for linux

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6060

gives some ideas to work arounds, the most radical to recompile the 
kernel. Then a sysctl -a seems to indicate it is also a kernel 
limitation on FreeBSD:

kern.argmax: 262144

I'm not certain that this is the limit of command line arguments, and I 
  haven't tried to set it. Nor is it clear to me if this is the number 
of arguments or the number of characters in the argument string. In the 
latter case, a "few thousand" argumenst could easily reach that limit.

Cheers, Erik