[wellylug] cat bug ?

[David Antliff]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, Chris Harris wrote:
> I presume cat takes at most 1000 <= argc.

I discovered a similar problem with gcc the other day (well, ppc_8xx-gcc 
cross compiler) - we were passing so many -I... options to it that it 
had been silently dropping a few important ones for several months: a few 
-D's and more importantly, -Wall!

(Un)Luckily it didn't stop it completing but it would have been nice if 
gcc had told me it was doing that or even aborted! :)

BTW I think there are lots of implementations and re-implementations of 
cat. In Gentoo it's part of the coreutils source, and uses some common 
libraries for parsing the command line (libfetish or something bizarre?). 
What distro are you using?

Interestingly every time I have come across this, it's been due to an 
internal limit in the program on the number of parameters it can accept, 
not a limit on the absolute length of the command line.

-- 
David.