[CentOS] ls and rm: "argument list too long"

[Bart Schaefer]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 8:48 AM, fred smith
<fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
> I've always understood it to be an issue with commandline length: somewhere
> (probably in bash) there's a limit on how big a buffer is/can be used for
> storing the comamndline.

There are two possible buffer limits one could encounter: tty driver
input line buffer (which is not an issue for bash because readline
avoids it) and kernel exec space for the arguments plus environment
passed to a new process.  Only the second one causes the error message
that started this thread, and previous posts have pointed out that
recent Linux kernels have effectively removed that limit (see message
from Jeremy Sanders).