Re: findutils on interix

[James Youngman]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Markus Duft <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hey :)
>
> I recently updated my findutils builds on interix (work without
> any patches (except a gnulib patch i already submitted), thanks
> for the great work ;) ), and stumbled across a small problem:
>
> mduft xargs $ find /usr/ | ./xargs
> ./xargs: /bin/echo: Cannot allocate memory
>
> mduft xargs $ ./xargs --show-limits
> Your environment variables take up 3119 bytes
> POSIX upper limit on argument length (this system): 1043409
> POSIX smallest allowable upper limit on argument length (all systems): 4096
> Maximum length of command we could actually use: 1040290
> Size of command buffer we are actually using: 131072
>
>
> It seems that max argument length is too high...
>
> Now, i'm pretty aware that interix is doing _many_ things wrong, and
> sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX) may well return a much too high number, but to
> consistently handle such cases, would it be wise to cap the max argument
> length to a sane value in xargs?

This is a followup to the original problem report, since the idea in
the final paragraph above falls foul of apparent differences in the
way the environment is handled in Interix and POSIX.

Is there a (public or private) bug report on Interix covering this?

James.