RE: Limit to length of command line arguments? (was Cygwin/bash: need environment variables >32K)

[Jörg Schaible <Joerg dot Schaible at Elsag-Solutions dot com>]

Hi Barry,

Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) wrote on Thursday, October 23, 2003 12:43 AM:
> While doing some other work, I've come to the impression that
> this is not a fileutils problem.  In a directory with ~1700
> htm files whose names take 37k,

<snip>
 
> $ ls *
> bash: /bin/ls.exe: Invalid argument
> 
> There has been a big change my cygwin installation since last
> week.  I got a new box, upgrading from Win98SE to XP Pro.  So
> this is a new installation of cygwin, but other than this
> line-length problem, everything seems to be working OK
> (ignoring minor glitches probably due to various
> configuration files getting lost in the transition).
> 
> Although I could re-do my scripts to work around this problem
> I'd appreciate any help in figuring out what is wrong with my cygwin
> installation. 

You might have an unusual filename (e.g. starting with a dash) that is interpreted as argument. Try

$ ls -- *

This tells ls to interpret anything after the double dash as file argument and not as possible option!

Regards,
Jörg

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/