关于“Argument list too long”

今天又看见这个信息了，虽然已经知道是glibc的限制，但还是好奇了一把，找了找资料。最后终于发现是ARG_MAX。

下面是一篇参考资料

Re: argument list too long From: Bob Proulx Subject: Re: argument list too long Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 09:22:21 -0600 Frank

Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 10:30:03 -0700

An interresting time warp. My machine received your mail before you sent it. :-)

Thu, 18 Oct 2001 08:33:29 -0600

almost any program like ‘rm’ ‘ls’ etc complains to display or delete my directory contents (9780 files). doing it with a workarround is cumbersome. can’t these progrs use dynamic memory allocation ?

Those programs do use dynamic memory allocation. I am not sure why you think they do not. But some specific versions do have known problems. It would be most helpful if we knew the OS you were running on, the version of the program and the exact commands you were running to recreate any problem behavior. Otherwise we can only guess and assume.

But you said 9780 files which would lead me to believe you ran out of environment space. That leads me to the following canned answer about this. But notice the message came from “bash” and not from “mv” in my example below. It is an operating system limitation and usually reported by your command line shell. You did not include your example and so I can’t tell if this mathes your problem exactly. I can only guess and assume it does. :-)

Bob

Canned reply follows…

I tried to move about 5000 files with mv, but it said:

bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long

The UNIX operating system tradionally has a fixed limit for the amount of memory that can be used for a program environment and argument list combined. You can use getconf to return that limit. On my Linux system (2.2.12) that amount is 128k. On my HP-UX system (11.0) that amount is 2M. It can vary per operating system. POSIX only requires 20k which was the traditional value used for probably 20 years. Newer operating systems releases usually increase that somewhat.

getconf ARG_MAX 131072

Note that your message came from “bash” your shell command line interpreter. Its job is to expand command line wildcard characters that match filenames. It expands them before any program can see them. This is therefore common to all programs on most UNIX-like operating systems. It cannot exceed the OS limit of ARG_MAX and if it tries to do so the error “Argument list too long” is returned to the shell and the shell returns it to your.

This is not a bug in ‘mv’ or other utilitities nor is it a bug in ‘bash’ or any other shell. It is an architecture limitation of UNIX-like operating systems. However, it is one that is easily worked around using the supplied utilities. Please review the documentation on ‘find’ and ‘xargs’ for one possible combination of programs that work well.

You might think about increasing the value of ARG_MAX but I advise against it. Any limit, even if large, is still a limit. As long as it exists then it should be worked around for robust script operation. On the command line most of us ignore it unless we exceed it at which time we fall back to more robust methods.

Here is an example using chmod where exceeding ARG_MAX argument length is avoided.