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From: ericblake AT comcast DOT net (Eric Blake)
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Bash login breaks if too many environment variables are set
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:00:05 +0000
Message-Id: <091620051700.16019.432AFA150000B34B00003E9322007456720A050E040D0C079D0A@comcast.net>

> >
> >I don't think all places in Windows have the limitation.
> 
> Look at the code.  We're inspecting a buffer returned from
> GetEnvironmentStrings.  That is a windows function.  The very first
> things returned from this are garbage.

OK, I stand corrected.

$ /bin/env | wc -c
34664
$ cmd
bash: /cygdrive/c/WINNT/system32/cmd: Invalid argument
$ strace /bin/env
bash: /usr/bin/strace: Invalid argument

On the other hand, POSIX would claim that this usage should
be failing with E2BIG, not EINVAL.  So it looks like Windows does
have a hard limit at total environment size of 32k (in spite of their
documentation never mentioning it), but that cygwin could
do better at reporting the error when trying to invoke a native
process.

--
Eric Blake


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