Re: Resend: Work-around for Small Kernel Environment Size

[Tom Browder]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
...
> The file is 4067 _lines_ long.  When you pass that to xargs, it will
> combine as many lines together as possible while still fitting into the
> system's environment restrictions.  That's what xargs does.
...
> xargs is READING A FILE, not obtaining the arguments from the command
> line, and obviously the limits on environment size don't apply to files.
> Then xargs combines some number of lines of the file, such that it is
> not too large for the kernel, and generates a command line.  Then it
> takes the next batch and does the same thing.

Ah, I'm not sure I understood that clearly.  The man page is a little sparse.

> What all the trickery in MAKE_LONG_LIST, etc. is doing is writing all
> those elements out to a file, without ITSELF running into the
> environment size restriction.

Okay, that's what I couldn't see.  I'll study it a little more closely.

> If you're still not seeing what's going on let me know.

Thanks you so much, Paul.

-Tom

P.S.  Is there a link on the GNU make site to your personal make site
(http://make.paulandlesley.org/autodep.html)?  I thought there was but
I couldn't find it when I was trying to point it out to Vijay earlier.