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Peter.O
Asked: 2010-11-20 12:05:44 +0800 CST

What is the maximum length of command line arguments in gnome-terminal?

  • 772

What is the maximum length of command line arguments in gnome-terminal?

... and is there a system environment variable which reports this value?

command-line gnome-terminal

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    xargs knows. On my system,

    $ xargs --show-limits
Your environment variables take up 2572 bytes
POSIX upper limit on argument length (this system): 2092532
POSIX smallest allowable upper limit on argument length (all systems): 4096
Maximum length of command we could actually use: 2089960
Size of command buffer we are actually using: 131072
    • 34

  2. The answer comes from the sysconf value ARG_MAX. To examine it on your system:

    getconf ARG_MAX

    For me, this reports 2097152. For more details check the manpage:

    man sysconf

    To get this inside a program, for example:

    #include <unistd.h>
...
printf("%ld\n", sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX));
    • 18

  3. I don't really know about gnome-terminal, but the shell has not a 'fixed' limit, but the limit of the stack.

    However there is an hardcode limit per-argument that is 128KB, that should not be a problem if you don't use 'very very very long arguments....'.

    You can read more about this here:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg05522.html

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