Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Limit to array size under cc?
Message-ID: <570@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jan 88 02:32:28 GMT
References: <3537@ames.arpa> <594X@esunix.UUCP>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 19
Summary: stack limit not compiled-in

In article <594X@esunix.UUCP>, rushfort@esunix.UUCP (Kevin Rushforth) writes:
> This is not a limit on the size of an array imposed by your compiler,
> but rather a limit on the stack size imposed by your OS.  4.2/4.3 based
> Unix systems (as well as others) have compiled in limits on stack size
> (the csh command "limit" will tell you how much).

The limit is not compiled-in.  (There may be a compiled-in limit, but
the number Csh will tell you is usually well below it.)  For example,
	% limit stacksize
on my machine just now reported
	stacksize       512 kbytes
I then said
	% limit stacksize 2M
and it raised the limit to 2 megabytes.  This isn't really a good idea.
4BSD systems also have a rather nice function
	alloca(size)
allocates that much space in the stack; it will go away when the
calling function returns.  The stack size limit applies to alloca()
as well as to explicitly declared arrays.