Re: VC and too long command lines

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 21 Jul 2011, Eli Zaretskii said:

>> Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:16:17 +0200
>> From: Deniz Dogan <deniz@dogan.se>
>> 
>> Do you happen to know of any reliable way to determine the maximum
>> command line length of the user system?
>
> There isn't any, AFAIK.

There is, but it's time-consuming. Repeatedly retry a longer and longer
harmless command until one fails. (libtool does it.)

(Note that just because a command succeeds doesn't mean a later one
won't fail: many Unix systems have a fixed length for
cmdline+environment, so if the environment grows then the command-line
space necessarily must shrink. So this probably isn't actually much use
because it means we can't check in advance, and it's too slow to check
at the time. I suppose we could check in advance, and only recheck if
someone calls `setenv'...)

-- 
NULL && (void)