topic Re: Command line 256 characters in Operating System - HP-UX

Command line 256 characters

Martin Robinson — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 07:47:27 GMT

I've hit a problem with a Makefile. Due to setting symbols the generated cc command is longer than 256 characters, and is silently truncated.

On my terminal window, cutting and pasting to make a command line more than 256 characters seems to accept it, but beeps for every character over 256 and only executes the first 256 characters.

However, echo * | wc -c can report a value MUCH bigger than 256 characters, and I am sure the shell line length is colossal in 11.11i.

There is a $(SHELL) variable in the Makefile which I have set to /usr/bin/ksh to make sure it's not using /bin/sh, which may have different limits.

Re: Command line 256 characters

Massimo Bianchi — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:04:34 GMT

Hi,
did you try splitting the line with a "\" at the end, every 200 characters or so ?

I overcomed the same problem with this trick many times.

HTH,
Massimo

Re: Command line 256 characters

Karthik S S — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:01:15 GMT

Hi,

Refer to the following link ..

Handle Too-Long Command Lines with xargs

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/lpt/09_21.html

Regards,
Karthik S S

Re: Command line 256 characters

Bill McNAMARA_1 — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:09:56 GMT

as pointed out you should use the \ to break long lines.

I used to come across this problem with vgimports and vgcreates with lots of disk device files.

the best way to do it is in your makefile:

cc -o $OPTIONS -o2 $OPTIONS2 -o3 $OPTIONS3 -o4 $OPTIONS4

or something like that..

Later,
Bill

Re: Command line 256 characters

John Meissner — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:10:59 GMT

I ran into this problem while doing a make_tape_recovery once. I needed to exclude a lot of filesystems and ran out of space. at the end of each line I added a "\" which allowed me to continue my command on the next line