in reply to Lots and lots of arguments!

If it is reasonably efficient to pass lots of values to perl as a list of parameters, then that's fine by me

I think I might have been affected by programming using old shells where a maximum of 9 parameters could be passed

I can't use a file to hold anything... I just have to hookup to a web process that will trigger my perl proggie and send it lots and lots (well, a few dozen mebbe... but that is a lot, to me) or values.

My question was, I guess, is there is a way to pack these into just a few parameters, and unpack them in my perl proggie to get the full list back.

But if perl doesn't care how many it receives, I guess I shouldn't either... so I can ignore this idea and the overhead it would induce.

Thanks for the replies, they included some interesting discussion points etc.

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Re^2: Lots and lots of arguments!
by RonW (Parson) on Dec 12, 2014 at 17:33 UTC
    My question was ... is there is a way to pack these into just a few parameters, and unpack them ... to get the full list back.

    Sounds like you have some input as to how the parameters are passed to your program.

    If the combined length is (or becomes) an issue (the number doesn't matter, it's the total of bytes that is limited), you might consider having the "caller" of your program pipe the parameters to your program's standard input (STDIN), one parameter per line.

    If a lot of the parameters are numbers, having the caller pack, then uuencode the parameters might compact the total number of bytes being passed, but this will add processing overhead.

    If that isn't enough, the caller could compress the parameters using bzip, gzip or similar, then uuencode that. But that will add even more processing overhead.

    The simplest, least overhead, way to get around command line limits would be to pipe the parameters, as I described.

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