Argument list too long.

[Mike A. Harris]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Dag Wieers wrote:

>Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 17:41:35 +0200 (CEST)
>From: Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>
>To: rhl-devel-list at redhat.com
>Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>List-Id: For developers, developers, developers <rhl-devel-list.redhat.com>
>Subject: Re: Argument list too long.
>
>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.

xargs isn't called once per argument, so you wouldn't do it 1000 
times.  A few times perhaps.  Red Hat signs tonnes of RPM 
packages, and we never seem to have a problem with this.  ;o)

>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.

And break a lot of software in the process.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat