[plug] xargs, "Argument list too long"

[James Devenish]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 11:42:11AM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> | Having no limit of any form, or an maximum that can be
> | dynamically increased by general users, might be fine for single-user
> | machines but would be a bit of a liability on multi-user machines and
> | network hosts.
> 
> *removes tongue from cheek*
> 
> Erm, why?  This sounds like the kind of thing that should be handled by
> ulimit, either as a maximum memory limit or as a separate limit for
> maximum command line per process.

Exactly. I think we agree. (I chose the phrase 'increased by general
users' to imply 'only increased up to some hard limit imposed by the
limited privileges of that process'. It is accidental if it looked like
that sentence was a rationale for the proceeding one where I said that I
didn't know of any ulimit implentation.) Perhaps making this work with
ulimit is a non-trivial problem that hasn't been solved for most
Unix-like operating systems, so we're stuck with a system-wide kernel
value which seems not to be ideal.