Re: is this a bug?

[Stephan Beal]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Mark Galeck (CW) <address@hidden> wrote:

Well, I found what was causing this.  I attempted to call the
$(wildcard ...
function, with about 50,000 arguments (full path names, on average 100 characters, so the total size of all strings that were passed to wildcard, is about 5MB).  Is this a bad idea?  :)

If you're then passing that wildcard list to a program, you could very well be exceeding the maximum argument length limit of your shell. Early versions of DOS's command.com allowed only something like 128 characters per command line, and i _think_ the average limit on Unix is 32k (the maximum signed int value, IIRC, since that's what main() takes as its argc type).

-- 
----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/