RE: too many .o files in a directory

[Leeuwesteijn,Joost]

Hi John,

> It builds a single filelist file that's 760+ lines, 8300+ 
> words in size in the format:
>   VCS_OBS =5NrI_d.o 5NrIB_d.o lOsn_1_d.o ... \
>      .... \
>      .... \
> which just causes problems.
> 
> The compile and final link works sometimes, but fails other 
> times because the argument list passed by make is too long, 
> it hits the ARGS_MAX limit on linux.  This works just fine on 
> Solaris since they're limit is around 2mb, while on Linux 
> it's just 128k.

The compiler that we're using is a 1997 DOS compiler which behaves a bit
strange sometimes. And even when cmd.exe accepts long arguments, the
compiler only seems to have a 127 character buffer so you're done pretty
quick with only a couple of include dirs. Because this was a common problem,
the compiler does support command/response files. You might be able to use
that if your compiler (gcc?) supports it. Just dump all the .o's (VCS_OBS)
into a temp file and feed it to the compiler if possible.
In my case:
    @(ECHO) $(ALL_OBJS) > resp_file
    $(CC) @resp_file

Regards,
Joost