Re: [Nmh-workers] rmmproc Not Used for Lots of Messages; refile Copies.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Paul (Fox),

> so, i've stumbled over rmmproc's limit in the past (and, like others,
> have quietly, manually, done it in chunks instead), but i don't think
> i've ever seen a similar limit with "rm".  and now i'm wondering, why
> not?  certainly this works just fine:
> 
>     $ mkdir /tmp/many
>     $ cd /tmp/many
>     $ touch $(seq 1 100000)
>     $ ls | wc -l
>     100000
>     $ rm *
>     $ ls
>     $
> 
> i didn't strace it, but i assume that touch and rm are both executed
> just once by the shell.

They are, yes.  Note that your touch is the first time 1e5 arguments are
passed to a command;  the shell's glob of `*' will be a similar sized
list for rm.  So if the touch worked, rm should too.

Adding a 0 breaks it for me.

    $ LC_ALL=C strace -fe execve bash -c 'touch $(seq 1000000)'
    execve("/bin/bash", ["bash", "-c", "touch $(seq 1000000)"],
        [/* 59 vars */]) = 0
    Process 11409 attached
    Process 11410 attached
    Process 11409 suspended
    [pid 11410] execve("/usr/bin/seq", ["seq", "1000000"],
        [/* 58 vars */]) = 0
    Process 11409 resumed
    Process 11410 detached
    [pid 11409] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
    Process 11409 detached
    --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
    execve("/usr/bin/touch", ["touch", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6",
        "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12", "13", "14", "15", ...],
        [/* 58 vars */]) = -1 E2BIG (Argument list too long)
    bash: /usr/bin/touch: Argument list too long
    $ 

Cheers, Ralph.