Recently I had a user who needed to remove 17k files all at once and
received the message 'rm: Argument list too long'. In his case an rm
-rf on the directory itself solved his problem, but after a quick web
search, it seems that the value of MAX_ARG_PAGES in
include/linux/binfmts.h (32) is responsible for this limitation. Could
this value possibly be increased safely? I'm curious, is there some
other limitation that has been breached in the 2.5 series that would
make it safer to increase MAX_ARG_PAGES?
-alan
Thanks. I don't subscribe to lkml, so I missed this. It would be nice
if this was made tunable via sysctl, as was suggested in the thread you
pointed me to.
Tricks to get around it in userspace are a rather fun exercise though :o)
-alan
> At 20:22 on Tue 19/11/02, [email protected] masquerading as 'Alan Willis'
> wrote:
>>
>> Recently I had a user who needed to remove 17k files all at once
>> and
>> received the message 'rm: Argument list too long'. In his case an rm
>> -rf on the directory itself solved his problem, but after a quick web
>> search, it seems that the value of MAX_ARG_PAGES in
>> include/linux/binfmts.h (32) is responsible for this limitation.
>> Could this value possibly be increased safely? I'm curious, is there
>> some other limitation that has been breached in the 2.5 series that
>> would make it safer to increase MAX_ARG_PAGES?
>
> See lkml passim (circa 3:30pm 12 Nov 2002 starting with a message from
> Adam Voigt)
>
>
> --
>
> Jonathan Sambrook
> Software Developer
> Designer Servers