The problem with the large command line is a shell problem; the shell can't
work with the large command line parameters. Passing a large command line
to "awk" or to other utilities creates problems. For example, If you try
to "echo" a lot of characters (as shown below), it won't work.
1 echo '
2 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
3 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
. :::
. ' a lot more X's '
. :::
24 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
25 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
26 '
The Korn shell has the same problem, only it
allows a much larger number of characters. The Korn shell doesn't dump a
core, while "csh" and "sh" do. It seems that the A/UX shells (Bourne, Csh,
or Korn) have limitations on the size of their arguments.
The same echo command is successful on a BSD UNIX system.