Re: [RFC/PATCH] RLIMIT_ARG_MAX

Peter Zijlstra
2008-02-29T17:18:44Z

On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 09:12 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> > 2. It provides a sane mechanism for an application to determine the
> > space available for argv+environ. Formerly this space was an
> > invariant, advertised via sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX).
>
> ... and what's the point? We've never had it before, nobody has ever cared,
> and the whole notion is just stupid. Why would we want to limit it? The
> only thing that the kernel *cares* about is the stack size - any other
> size limits are always going to be arbitrary.

Well, don't think of limiting it, but querying the limit.

Programs like xargs would need to know how much to stuff into argv
before starting a new invocation.