As many other people have pointed out, your argument list is too long. However, rather than suggesting some special arg-processing scheme (e.g., some 'xargs'-like mechanism), I would suggest that you instead reconsider your approach to the way you handle your data: if you have so many arguments on the command line that the shell is choking, then you shouldn't be presenting that data as commandline arguments. Placing it in a file, for example, and processing that file would eliminate those problems. You could also, for example, create a named pipe and have your Perl script read from it, with each argument being processed as it comes in (assuming that this is a valid way of processing your data.) In short, it's not your code that's a problem: it's your approach to handling your data. Change your approach, and the problem will go away.

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Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- HG Wells