Re: delete large list of files

[Raleigh Rinehart]

> > This is using gnu-make 3.81 on windows:
> i don't know if this is still the case, but back when i used Windows its
> default shell had a very small command-line-length limit (128 characters,
> maybe? 256?). Unix shells tend to have a much higher limit. In the off
> chance that you have "xargs" on Windows, that tool is made for breaking up
> long argument lists, e.g.:
>
> ~>  xargs rm<  list_of_files.txt

Indeed, this is the very issue I am trying to work around.  The limit 
seems to be much higher that 256, but It doesn't seem to match the 
microsoft docs of 32K (for CreateProcess) either.  I'm guessing it is 
around the limits of cmd.exe's 8192 chars. However I am not sure of the 
exact limit as I have not done any empirical testing to determine it.  
In any case a very long list still causes make to barf.

Unfortunately, using xargs won't work either.  To do that we would need 
to write the list of things, files in this instance, to a text file, 
which of course brings back around to the first problem.  There is no 
way that I have found to get the list of things, out of make in one 
chunk (on win32).  Hence the rather esoteric function to break the list 
up into smaller pieces.

thanks,
-raleigh