On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:53:53PM -0600, Patrick Wolfe wrote:
> The bourne shell script "libtool" takes the command line that is passed to it
> and runs each argument through a loop, eventually appending some text to a
> variable, but the whole linker command line is so long now, that the Bourne
> shell cannot handle it (the shell has a maximum command line length limit of
> 10240 characters - same as KSH and BASH).
Nope. The Bourne shell has had, for ages (as in "probably dating back
to the UNIX Time-Sharing System, Seventh Edition, back in 1979") not had
a low limit such as that. (Unlike the C shell, which *does* have such a
limit - and, when I looked at it, ages ago, back when I was at Sun, it
wasn't easy to remove - the Bourne shell has no fixed limit, it just
keeps allocating memory as needed.)
Many UNIX *kernels* have a 10240-character limit on the number of
characters that can be passed to a process, but SunOS hasn't had that
low a limit since SunOS 4.0, back in 1986/1987 or so (the limit was
raised to a megabyte or so, and that was, as I remember, propagated to
System V Release 4 and thus to SunOS 5.x). I wish other UNIXes had
large limits like that....
The problem is, as Ed Warnicke noted, with "sed". The version in
"/usr/bin" has a really low limit on line lengths; "/usr/xpg4/bin/sed"
is a bit better, with a higher limit, and it can handle Ethereal 0.9.0,
but I think its limit is still low enough that some programs might have
problems.