Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Size Limitations

| ### 22.2.1 Size Limitations Quite a lot of the Unix vendor implementations of the Bourne shell have a fixed buffer for storing command lines, as small as 512 characters in the worst cases. You may have an error akin to this:
    $ ls -d /usr/bin/* | wc -l
    sh: error: line too long
Notice that the limit applies to the expanded command line, not just the characters typed in for the line. A portable way to write this would be:
    $ ( cd /usr/bin && ls | wc -l )
       1556

This document was generated by Gary V. Vaughan on May, 24 2001 using texi2html