The execve syscall returns -E2BIG in 3 cases: - The total length of the command line arguments and environment is too large. - An argument or environment string is longer than MAX_ARG_STRLEN. - The full path to the executable exceeds MAX_ARG_STRLEN. Spell out all 3 cases in the -E2BIG section. Discovered by moving a too large commandline parameter to an environment variable, and finding that things still did not work. Examined the code in fs/exec.c to get the details. This shell script starts failing at 2^17 on a system with 4kB page size: ./exec2big.sh: line 10: /bin/true: Argument list too long fork failed at loop 17 STRING="a" for loop in `seq 20`; do STRING="$STRING$STRING" export STRING if /bin/true ; then : # still under the limit else echo "fork failed at loop $loop" fi done Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx> Suggested-by: Matthew House <mattlloydhouse@xxxxxxxxx> --- man2/execve.2 | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/man2/execve.2 b/man2/execve.2 index 0d9582492ad1..85c6ec15df3c 100644 --- a/man2/execve.2 +++ b/man2/execve.2 @@ -449,7 +449,8 @@ The total number of bytes in the environment .RI ( envp ) and argument list .RI ( argv ) -is too large. +is too large, an argument or environment string is too long, or +the full path name to the executable is too long. .TP .B EACCES Search permission is denied on a component of the path prefix of -- 2.41.0
