On 11/8/18 6:50 AM, Peng Yu wrote: > Hi, > > It seems that the default value for --max-args is system dependent. Is > there a way to find out its default value? Thanks.
Actually the limit is not a matter of the number of arguments but that of the resulting total command line length. >From 'man xargs': --show-limits Display the limits on the command-line length which are imposed by the operating system, xargs' choice of buffer size and the -s option. Pipe the input from /dev/null (and perhaps specify --no-run-if-empty) if you don't want xargs to do anything. So here it is: $ xargs --show-limits </dev/null Your environment variables take up 3163 bytes POSIX upper limit on argument length (this system): 2091941 POSIX smallest allowable upper limit on argument length (all systems): 4096 Maximum length of command we could actually use: 2088778 Size of command buffer we are actually using: 131072 Maximum parallelism (--max-procs must be no greater): 2147483647 It's "actually using: 131072". So even if you specify a higher number like 'xargs -n 200000', and all the arguments only have 1 character, then still the number of actual arguments for each program execution cannot be larger than about 131072/2 minus a few bytes: echo called only once: $ yes . | head -n $(bc <<<'131072 /2 - 3') | xargs -tn 200000 2>&1 | tr -d '[. ]' echo echo called twice: $ yes . | head -n $(bc <<<'131072 /2 - 2') | xargs -tn 200000 2>&1 | tr -d '[. ]' echo echo Have a nice day, Berny