Work-around for Exceeding Kernel Environment Size

[Tom Browder]

This message discussed a method for working around kernel limits to
the environment size:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2006-03/msg00114.html

I am trying to use that solution but have noticed that the file used
to feed xargs does not seem to be limited to lines of 500 words.  The
file in my case gets exactly one word per line.  I have tried fiddling
with the various definitions but get either one long line or one line
per arg--nothing in between.

Here is the ADD_TO_LIST function from that message:

define ADD_TO_LIST
        @printf "%s\n" $(wordlist 1,$(3),$(2)) >> $(1)
        $(if $(nextword),$(call ADD_TO_LIST,$(1),$(nextlist),$(3)),@echo)
endef

It looks to me, from my tests, as if the print line is iterating over
the individual tokens of the $(wordlist ...) instead of getting the
whole chunk as a single string--thus each token gets a newline..

Can anyone explain how to change that behavior?  Or did I miss
something in the thread?

BTW, I'm running Fedora 7 (x86) with make 3.81.

Thanks.

-Tom