Re: Line length limitations

[Robert Boehne]

address@hidden wrote:
> 
> On Sun, May 27, 2001 at 07:10:43PM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> > On May 27, 2001, address@hidden wrote:
> >
> > > Turns out the problem was with sed. Solaris
> > > 2.5.1-8/SPARC have the same problem.
> >
> > > The problem arises with the assignment for compile_command. I get:
> > >   Output line too long.
> > >   Output line too long.
> >
> > Wow!  At least you get some output.  Some seds will just throw away
> > the excess characters.
> >
> > > Should the command to find the maximum command-line length take the
> > > above into consideration?
> >
> > Yep.  This is in our wishlist.
> >
> > > And, if it did, would it have helped?
> >
> > Only to the point of warning you in case sed is broken if you use long
> > command lines.  I can't think of any reasonable way to make it work in
> > this case.
> 
> Would you accept a patch to libtool to locale a better sed on the
> system? On solaris, /usr/xpg4/bin/sed works better than /usr/bin/sed.
> I imagine some autoconf addition that sent a long string to various
> sed's on the system and whichever worked would be used as the sed in
> libtool.
> 
> --
> albert chin (address@hidden)
> 

Albert:

That's a great idea, why didn't I think of that.  :)
I think that we'd still want to check it's limits and
report a warning if there is truncation.
The thing that makes this tricky is that SGI has in
general a sed that truncates to 8201 characters and
a shell that truncates to ~5000 characters.  So you
can't use 'expr' to count the output.  It's opposite
on Solaris, the shell allows ~500,000 characters while
sed (the one generally found first) truncates to 4000.
So I'm sure how to check the limits under SGI without
the 'wc' command.

Robert

-- 
Robert Boehne             Software Engineer
Ricardo Software   Chicago Technical Center
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