Too many Environment variables...

[jmckinzie]

I am having a problem...when we try to login to our system, we have to remove some environment variables from our current shell in order to login as root.

So, I did some reading and found that there is a 10k size limit on environment variables in HP.

How can I increease this limit?

Thanks

Jody

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You must be running a very old version of HP-UX. Argmax is now very large. For the older versions of HP-UX there was a patch that allowed you to increase ncargmax (or something like that) but you will probably have a hard time finding this patch is your OS is as old as I think it is? What version HP-UX are you running?

You can try running "getconf ARG_MAX" to get your current setting.

[jmckinzie]

I am eunning HPUX 11.11. However, we have over 300 environment variables.
I know its the variables because, if i remove some of them using the unset command(i have a script), then it works just fine.

Any ideas?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Under 11.11, arg_max is 2MB which you can confirm by running getconf ARG_MAX. I assume it displays 2MB and this means that you could have 300 variables each about 7K in length. I find it hard to believe that anyone has an environment that Looney Tunes.

[jmckinzie]

WE actually have a bout 430 variables.

I just created an unset script to temporarily unset the variables.