Argument list too long.

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 18:30:49 +0200 (CEST)
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:

> On 11 Sep 2003, Tom Tromey wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Dag" == Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> writes:
> > 
> > >> man xargs
> > 
> > Dag> Seems plausible but unpractical in some situations. Eg. you're resigning
> > Dag> thousands of files, too long for the argument list. Doing it one by one 
> > Dag> would force you to enter your passphrase a thousand times.
> > 
> > Occasionally you have to change a program to let you specify a list of
> > arguments in some other way.  For instance, this came up for libtool
> > with very large numbers of object files.
> 
> Ok, then I'm on the right list afterall ;)
> 
> Please Red Hat change rpm so that I can sign packages without giving them 
> as arguments and without having to enter my passphrase for each (set of) 
> packages.
> 
> This seems really silly to me however and this was just an example. Fact 
> is that most scripts suffer from this and as usual people will only notice 
> this when the script fails (with potential data-loss, manual correction 
> and other horrible things). </scare-tactics>
> 

Dag,

     But this is _exactly_ the point that goes against your own argument.   If 
you accept that there has to be some upper limit then a properly written
script will always have to guard against such buffer overflows.   No matter
what limit you pick.

Cheers,
Sean