Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 115498
scripts/mkdep: Argument list too long
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:36 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: If one increases the number of files passed to mkdep when creating a custom kernel, the use of find in shell backquotes results in an argument list too long error: /bin/sh: line 1: scripts/mkdep: Argument list too long Solution: use xargs. I've attached a patch against 2166. It includes the -r argument to xargs, which is technically correct, but not supported on all platforms (e.g., Solaris). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.22-1.2166.nptl How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Add some files. (I added Netfilter p-o-m and a few other modules.) 2, Build the kernel. Actual Results: /bin/sh: line 1: scripts/mkdep: Argument list too long Additional info:
Created attachment 97636 [details] Patch to fix argument list too long error.
Having run into this problem on numerous occasions and just recently causing me a major headache I did some searching. There seems to be an argument limit is the kernel that prevents passing to many files names to various functions. There are many work arounds that sometimes work but many times don't. This is going to increase the number of headaches for many users as more and more users are starting to process a larger number of files. This needs to be fixed. If you have alot of files to mv, rm or process, you run into a limit. In the case of rm or mv, it is possible to put wildcards into the command to limit the number of files being processed at one time. Other applications don't work as well. I ran into this problem with PAN and a mpg file I was trying to download. The file had 1510 attachments that needed to be ydecoded and pan would just stop processing the file. I saved the text files for each attachment and then procedded to process the files by typing in ydecode * and received the "Argument list too long" message. I searched the net and found that there is a change to the kernel that can fix this problem but you have to re-compile the kernel. I don't want to do this on all my machines. It may be a good idea to increase this argument on all future kernels. I am using FC1 and will update to FC3 when it is out. I hope that this is fixed then. Suggested enhancement as well as a major headache.
I ran into this on stock 2.6.8 for arm, so it really needs fixing. Probably with xargs, though I haven't looked at it...
Err, it was stock 2.4.26 I ran into this on. And I didn't see the patch attached to the previous comment; I'll try that out now.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/