in reply to Maximum number of characters

as much as the memory of your machine allows...

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Maximum number of characters
by fglock (Vicar) on Oct 31, 2002 at 20:50 UTC

    ... divided (roughly) by the number of simultaneous proccesses.

      Very roughly, if at all. It depends not only of how much memory those other processes are using, but also on the particulars of the Virtual Memory implementation of the system (if any), the amount of swap space, whether you can overcommit memory etc.

      To get back to the original poster's question: the only limit on the size of a variable in Perl is memory. How much that is in practice is difficult to predict, as fglock's post indicates.

      CU
      Robartes- who will now take of his pedantic hat and quietly shamble off to take a seat in the back of the room again

Re: Re: Maximum number of characters
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Oct 31, 2002 at 22:55 UTC
    Doesn't perl represent the size as a integer or ANSI C size_t variable? Then it would be limited to 4GB or whatever based on a union of your integer size and the integer size of Larry's machine where he may have made assumptions.