[lug] Limits of grep?

[Michael J. Pedersen]

On Tue, Sep 26, 2000 at 07:49:55AM -0600, Hugh Brown wrote:
> This is a limitation of the shell most likely (on the order of 256
> characters, I think).

Some notes on these limitations of command lines (I know because I've recently
had cause to look):

command.com, under dos, had a command line limit of 127 characters.
command.com, under windows 95, had a larger limit, I think, of 256 characters
             (haven't had to look at that one, so not sure)
cmd.exe, under windows nt, has a hard limit of 2046 characters on the command
             line. The missing two characters to make it 2k are a newline and
			 null ('\0').
bash, I can't seem to find the limit, no matter how hard I try. It just keeps
             working. Someone else mentioned a limit of 4000 words, which
			 seems plausible enough.

All the Windows 95+ versions have a kernel call which will allow you create a
process with as large a command line as you wish (one person has reported
making a command line of 10 megabytes work correctly. Naturally, he was doing
this to see how far he could push this kernel call). Win3.1, I don't know if
it has a way of exceeding that command line limit, but I doubt it, since it's
(even more so than 95) just a shell on top of DOS.

-- 
Michael J. Pedersen
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