[plug] xargs, "Argument list too long" (OT-ish)

[James Devenish]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 12:05:46PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> echo 128 > /proc/sys/max_arg_pages
> 
> would be really, really nice.

I imagine that is what people are thinking of as a first step.  And
while it allows you to set relaxed system-wide policy, it's of no help
in maintaining limited user privileges and sanity checks. (Though,
granted, operating systems with multi-megabyte limits don't seem to
elicit complaints of "my arguments can be too long".)

> I don't think it'd really be something you'd need to limit per-user or 
> per-process like ulimit allows. That'd add another overhead to each 
> process' info as well. I'd be more inclined to think a /proc or /sys 
> (??) interface might be the way to do it.

So then the root user would be giving all users and all processes the
ability to use more memory for argument lists just so that the root user
can mkisofs? And once this change has been made, is it going to be left
like that? What if another admin logs in and changes it again for their
own purposes, interfering with what you're doing? And what if it doesn't
work because there is some other process limit? It might be more
administratively clean if it's instead handled by the well-known
mechanisms (ulimit, login.conf, &c) that already exist for setting
stack limits. But, I take the point that it is more practical to limit
the bloat to a /proc or sysctl implementation.

Maybe time to submit a feature request for mkisofs :) (i.e. accept paths
from a file containing one path per line or something, if that's the
problem.)