This is a kernel limitation. Shell arguments and environment variables are allocated from the same space and are limited to some number of pages - usually something like 32.

You'll probably have to come up with another way to pass your arguments, such as reading them through STDIN or passing them in a file.

For more discussion about this problem, see "Argument list too long": Beyond Arguments and Limitations

Here's a script to test what the limits for %ENV are: 

my $n = 0;
while (1) {
  $ENV{"X$n"} = "X" x 1024;
  test($n) or last;
  $n++;
}
print "first failure at n = $n\n";

sub test {
  my $n = shift;
  my $st = system('/bin/echo \\\$X1 >/dev/null');
  # Note: the above call to system() will cause the shell to
  # report 'Argument list too long' for a large enough environment.
  $st == 0;
}

[download]
On my Ubuntu box it first fails at n = 125, which corresponds to approx. 128 K (= 32 x 4K pages.)

In reply to Re: perl: Argument list too long by pc88mxer
in thread perl: Argument list too long by sjhalani

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