At 11:29 AM +1000 10/15/07, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>On 14Oct2007 17:09, John Summerfield <debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Cameron Simpson wrote:
>>> On 14Oct2007 14:39, I wrote:
>>> | Please read scripts carefully if you're going to criticise. Criticism is
>>> | welcome, if it's valid.
>>> Sorry for my tone. I have a headache and didn't allow for it.
>>
>> I'm more concerned that your "facts" aren't.
>
>Oh, but they _are_!
>
>> It doesn't matter how one creates the commandline, there is a limit on its
>> size. Here, I'm not concerned about side effects of bad characters such as
>> & and ;.
>
>Sure, but in the code we're discussing:
>
> for m in subdir/*report*
>
>that limit is not hit. Why not? Because the limit only applies to exec()
>calls. It is an OS interface limit. For loops take place entirely in
>user space. There is no "command line" being constructed in the sense
>you're thinking.
...
Whaddayaknow.
$ ls /*/*/*/*/* | wc
bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long
0 0 0
$ for n in /*/*/*/*/* ; do echo $n ; done | wc
211860 218203 7290275
$
--
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
