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).