How to increase ARG_MAX or disable the limit in HP-UX 11.23 IA64

[Eric Sun]

I am processing large a mount of files in 11.23, but the current ARG_MAX is 2048000, therefore I ran into "ksh: /usr/bin/ls: arg list too long" problem a lot.

I am wondering if there is a way to tune the kernerl paramter to increase the total length of the arguments for exec() in bytes, including environment data.

Or if there is a way to disable the limit of ARG_MAX?

Your advice is greatly appreciated.

E.S.

HP-UX hp14 B.11.23 U ia64

[Eric Sun]

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=765004

large_ncargs_enabled

I did not see this parameter in 11.23 either.

[Doug O'Leary]

Hey;

You don't really give enough info to help out. What are you trying to do with all the files? Is the list of files generated from another command?

One place people commonly run into this is via the find command. To circumvent that, you can:

find ${args} -print | xargs -i ${cmd} {}

If you're doing a straigh ls, loop through it:

ls | while read file
do
# whatever I want
done

HTH;

Doug

[Doug O'Leary]

Oh, sorry; my bad. To straight answer your question, no, to my knowledge, there is no way to modify the maximum argument length...

Doug

[Eric Sun]

Thanks. I will change my script to incorporate the xargs().