Alin Năstac wrote:
> I remember that one time I had to split a command like dohtml 
> "${S}"/something/*.{png,html} because the line was too long. At that 
> time, bash had a limit of 32K. Now is what ... 1M?

from execve(2):

Limits on size of arguments and environment

  Most Unix implementations impose some limit on the total size of the 
command-line argument (argv) and environment (envp) strings that may be 
passed to a new program. POSIX.1 allows an implementation to advertise 
this limit using the ARG_MAX constant (either defined in <limits.h> or 
available at run time using the call sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX)).

  On Linux prior to kernel 2.6.23, the memory used to store the 
environment and argument strings was limited to 32 pages (defined by the 
kernel constant MAX_ARG_PAGES). On architectures with a 4-kB page size, 
this yields a maximum size of 128 kB.

  On kernel 2.6.23 and later, most architectures support a size limit 
derived from the soft RLIMIT_STACK resource limit (see getrlimit(2)). 
For these architectures, the total size is limited to 1/4 of the allowed 
stack size, the limit per string is 32 pages (the kernel constant 
MAX_ARG_STRLEN), and the maximum number of strings is 0x7FFFFFFF. (This 
change allows programs to have a much larger argument and/or environment 
list. Imposing the 1/4-limit ensures that the new program always has 
some stack space.) Architectures with no memory management unit are 
excepted: they maintain the limit that was in effect before kernel 2.6.23.

Cheers,
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth