Limitations on a command line

[David Collier]

Thanks Denys, that will fix tar..

if I have other situations I can use xargs.

TVM

D



In article <201101300653.49945.vda.linux at googlemail.com>,
vda.linux at googlemail.com (Denys Vlasenko) wrote:

> *From:* Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux at googlemail.com>
> *To:* busybox at busybox.net, from_busybox_maillist at dexdyne.com
> *CC:* jeredb at dexdyne.com
> *Date:* Sun, 30 Jan 2011 06:53:49 +0100
> 
> On Friday 28 January 2011 19:26, David Collier wrote:
> > Is there any explicit limit on the size of command like busybox 
> > can swing
> > round it's head?
> > 
> > I have some rubbish code I've inherited and don't have time to 
> > rewrite,
> > which can spit out
> > 
> >    tar file1 file2 file3.... 
> >    
> > where each of the file names is up to 100 chars, and there could 
> > be up to
> > 2000 of them in theory.
> > 
> > I can change the limits to keep it all under 64 k or whatever... 
> > but is
> > there a magic number even smaller than that I should beware of?
> > 
> > A MOMENT LATER
> > 
> > I think I can tame this by suitable use of relative paths, but 
> > I'd still
> > be interested to know
> 
> # busybox tar --help
> BusyBox v1.18.0 (2010-11-23 00:11:12 CET) multi-call binary.
> 
> Usage: tar -[cxtzjaZmvO] [-X FILE] [-f TARFILE] [-C DIR] [FILE]...
> 
> Create, extract, or list files from a tar file
> 
> Operation:
>         c       Create
>         x       Extract
>         t       List
> Options:
>         f       Name of TARFILE ('-' for stdin/out)
>         C       Change to DIR before operation
>         v       Verbose
>         z       (De)compress using gzip
>         j       (De)compress using bzip2
>         a       (De)compress using lzma
>         Z       (De)compress using compress
>         O       Extract to stdout
>         h       Follow symlinks
>         m       Don't restore mtime
>         exclude File to exclude
>         X       File with names to exclude
>         T       File with names to include
>         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> -- 
> vda
>