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From: boschg@cs.utwente.nl (Geert Bosch)
Subject: Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length
Date: 1997/02/13
Message-ID: <5dv9at$25g@pandora.cs.utwente.nl>#1/1
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References: <5ds40o$rpo@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
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X-Server-Date: 13 Feb 1997 14:43:41 GMT
Organization: University of Twente, Dept. of Computer Science
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-02-13T14:43:41+00:00
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Ted Dennison (dennison@zippy.cc.ukans.edu) wrote:
: Hmmm. I thought all unix (and VMS) shells had a command-line limit of 256
: characters (or less). Is that not the case?

That is not the case for many shells. The shell I use (bash on SunOS 4.1.1)
has a command-line limit of 1 MB. I can hardly believe that many shells have
a command-line limit of 256 characters, since it is very common to enter
long command-lines in Unix. 

Also wildcards are expanded by the shellbefore passing the 
command-line to the external command. So the shell will need to
be able to process long command-lines anyway.

Regards,
   Geert