In an ftp session to transfer data between Linux servers the system does not allow me to enter strings longer than about 200 bytes. Please see a constructed example below. The system responds with the message sorry, input line too long The ftp session is included in a complex program and the error occurs because sometimes the files to be copied are very deep in the file system hierarchy which makes longer strings unavoidable. I could think of workarounds by making the file names shorter. But this would cause a lot of work. By the way, other UNIX products (i.e. HP-UX) do not have this problem. EXAMPLE: [root@twdfr112 ~]# ftp twdfr112 Connected to twdfr112.wdf.sap-ag.de. 220 twdfr112.wdf.sap-ag.de FTP server (Version wu-2.4.2-VR17 (1) Mon Apr 19 09:21:53 EDT 1999) ready. Name (twdfr112:root): root 331 Password required for root. Password: 230 User root logged in. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> cd /tmp 250 CWD command successful. ftp> dir 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. total 11896 drwxrwxrwt 9 root root 4096 Oct 19 04:02 . drwxr-xr-x 23 root dba 4096 Oct 14 13:43 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 15 15:48 aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa 226 Transfer complete. ftp> cd aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa sorry, input line too long
Call this a security feature, not a bug.