22.2.1 Size Limitations

22.2.1 Size Limitations

Quite a lot of the Unix vendor implementations of the Bourne shell have a fixed buffer for storing command lines, as small as 512 characters in the worst cases. You may have an error akin to this:

 $ ls -d /usr/bin/*  wc -l sh: error: line too long 

Notice that the limit applies to the expanded command line, not just the characters typed in for the line. A portable way to write this would be:

 $ ( cd /usr/bin && ls  wc -l )    1556 

This document was generated by Gary V. Vaughan on May, 24 2001 using texi2html