Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
Question: at what point would commands such as 'ls', 'cp' and others
consider the argument list too long? The reason I'm asking is because
I'm getting random results here. One time 'ls' would tell it the
argument list is too long when the file count in the folder reached
around 2,000 files. Another, like this morning, it let me go all the
way to 2,600+ before complaining. And just now it reached 1,900 files
and already 'ls' is complaining. That seems random to me. Is there a
set number that causes all of these commands to fail with 'Argument list
too long' or what convoluted algorithm is used to figure it out?
This is one of those issues that bothers me as well. The reason for the
limit is from the "Good Old Days" when memory was expensive and very
limited. I normally run into this problem when I have a program that
has to call a large number of files and then crashes due to the limit.
mainly usenet downloads.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6060/print
I did submit a bug report to allow this to be changed with the
possibility of user selectable option.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=227180
It is a "Won't fix" issue.
With the number of multimedia files on computers, this is becoming an
issue. Many applications don't know how to work with xargs by default.
Maybe it is time to start putting in bug reports for these applications.
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