Re: execve E2BIG (Argument list too long)

[Daniel Colascione]

On September 30, 2020 8:24:01 AM Ilkka Virta <itvirta@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 5:53 PM Michael Green <green@strato.de> wrote:
>
> > The included short script when run with the following command results
> > in execve "E2BIG (Argument list too long) errors".
> >
> > * The number of arguments can be tuned down to "seq 1 23694" and it
> > still occurs, but any lower and it disappears.
>
> That sounds a lot like the 128 kB hard limit Linux puts on the size of a
> single argument to exec. (I know it counts for command line arguments, I
> expect it also counts for env variables. They're passed in pretty much the
> same way anyway.)


It might be worth asking lkml to lift this restriction

> seq 1 23694 | wc  gives 131058, just a bit less than 131072. Add the
> variable name and it goes over. Workaround: use another OS, or pass big
> data like that in files.