Xref: utzoo comp.sources.bugs:2387 comp.unix.xenix:11442
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!crdgw1!zephyrus!davidsen
From: davidsen@zephyrus.Berkeley.EDU (william E Davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs,comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Pathalias Problem
Message-ID: <7467@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 8 May 90 20:27:15 GMT
References: <6145@ucrmath.UCR.EDU>
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Reply-To: davidsen@zephyrus.Berkeley.EDU (william E Davidsen)
Followup-To: comp.sources.bugs
Distribution: usa
Lines: 19

In article <6145@ucrmath.UCR.EDU>, gumby@ucrmath.UCR.EDU (john donahue) writes:
 
> It complains that the "arg list too long" and terminates. I moved some of
> the files to another directory temporarily so that it will work again
> (when this failed, my "paths" file was truncated to 0 so then "smail"
> would no longer resolve domain addresses).

  This means the list is larger than the buffer size for argv (I believe
5k). A new version of getopt won't help, you never get that far. I
solved it by writing a little sed script which accepted the names of all
the files as input and output only the non-comment lines. I put all USA
in one file, all domain, world other than usa, etc. Then I pathalias the
combined files.

  The script is a one liner, maybe even two lines, like:
	sed "
	s/#.*$//
	/^$/d
	" u.usa.* >usa.all