Length of Command Line?!!!

Lee D.Rothstein lee@veritech.com
Wed Dec 10 21:44:00 GMT 2008


I remember that in past versions of Windows, 'cmd.exe' imposed a 
draconianly short command line on Cygwin console. I was wondering 
whether the limitation applied to Xterm windows, as well. I have become 
quite adept at using xargs to avoid this limit. However, I was writing 
something about Cygwin and I thought it time to reverify.

So, I ran a little test, on both console and Xterm bash windows, and 
discovered that command lines > 260,000 characters are acceptable to 
_console_. (Xterm yields the same results.) I still haven't determined 
the upper limit.

I am running Vista 64 Home Premium (Ver 6.0 Build 6001 Service Pack 1; 
AMD 64 Quadcore), and Cygwin DLL ver 1.5.25-15.

Is this something "new" to Cygwin, or Windows Vista 64? As of which 
version of what?

Sorry to be so anachronistic.

So, once, again, Cygwin is better than I "remember"! ;-)

BTB, at least one document turned up in a Google search (of documents 
dated in the last year) indicated that GNU/Linux had a 128KB limit, and 
Cygwin, under XP, a 32KB limit!

Lee

Lee Rothstein


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