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[Cameron Simpson]

On 18Oct2007 08:02, John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
> Gordon Messmer wrote:
>> Steven W. Orr wrote:
>>> Ok. I now believe it but I don't understand why. The ls command gets 
>>> globbed and grows to be too big.  But the for commandline has to also 
>>> grow to the same size. Is it because the forloop is special?
>
> The FSF has some GNU software that handles arbitrarily-long strings safely. 
> No doubt bash is one of the packages that uses these functions.

This kind of question is better answered by looking at the source.  Everyone
writes code to handle arbitrarily large strings and arrays of them at some
point if they're doing that kind of thing. I certainly did in 1987 or so for
a personal project. And shells have handled this kind of thing for a very
long time, well before bash was around.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

If I repent anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.
    What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?     - Henry David Thoreau