[ adding bug-automake as a reminder for the distdir.am TODO item; this is <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.bugs/6807> ]
Hello Xan, * Xan Lopez wrote on Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 08:15:31AM CEST: > On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Xan Lopez<x...@gnome.org> wrote: > >> On Linux before 2.6.23(?), the default limit for command line plus > >> environment when executing a process is something like 128KB, but this > >> can be modified in the kernel (or /proc, I don't remember). On newer > >> Linux kernels, this limit has been lifted to not exist any more. [...] > > That's right, this limit can be modified recompiling the kernel (it's > > a #define IIRC), although that workaround is not very practical. It's > > good to know this is going away in recent kernels though. > > Oh, you wrote 2.6.23, not 2.6.32! Yep. :-) > I'm using 2.6.27, so this should be working. I googled a bit, and > found this page: http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/, which > indeed mentions ARG_MAX should be relative to the stack size in new > kernels. I increased my stack size with ulimit -s, and checked that > getconf ARG_MAX indeed grows with it. Still, distcheck still fails the > same way no matter how much I increase the value. Confirmed over here. This test: ulimit -s 32768 ulimit -s l=some-command-line-argument while /bin/true $l do echo size ${#l} worked l="$l $l" done gives me this encouraging output on 2.6.26: | 32768 | size 26 worked | [...] | size 3538943 worked | size 7077887 worked | bash: /bin/true: Argument list too long but this test: tr T '\t' >Makefile <<\END l := some-command-line-argument l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l l := $l $l all: T@/bin/true $l T: t...@l='$l'; echo size $${#l} worked T@/bin/true $l $l T: t...@l='$l $l'; echo size $${#l} worked END make maxes out even after the ulimit change: | : | size 110591 worked | : | make: execvp: /bin/sh: Argument list too long | make: *** [all] Error 127 with GNU Make 3.81. This shows the /bin/true commands both went successful (because make bypassed the shell for these), but the second command with shell constructs failed. Looking at the strace: | 20589 vfork() = 20591 | 20591 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 8) = 0 | 20591 execve("/bin/sh", ["/bin/sh", "-c", "l=\'some-command-line-argument so"...], [/* 56 vars */] <unfinished ...> | 20589 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 8) = 0 | 20589 wait4(-1, <unfinished ...> | 20591 <... execve resumed> ) = -1 E2BIG (Argument list too long) | 20591 open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) [...] | 20591 write(2, "make: ", 6) = 6 | 20591 write(2, "execvp: /bin/sh: Argument list t"..., 39) = 39 | 20591 write(2, "\n", 1) = 1 | 20591 exit_group(127) = ? | 20589 <... wait4 resumed> [{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 127}], 0, NULL) = 20591 | 20589 --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) --- | 20589 rt_sigreturn(0xffffffff) = 20591 we see that GNU make invokes /bin/sh -c "l=...; /bin/true ..." and passes the whole command as one command line argument to execve. Now, as Sven's page documents, Linux now has a per-argument limit of MAX_ARG_STRLEN (131072), which is what we're hitting here now. I'll take this up with bug-make. Thank you again for bringing it up. Cheers, Ralf
