Pathalias Problem

[John Woods]

In article <6145 at ucrmath.UCR.EDU>, gumby at ucrmath.UCR.EDU (john donahue) writes:
> My site just received some more map files in "comp.mail.maps"
> last night and suddenly, pathalias no longer works. It is now complaining
> that the argument list of files is too long. There are now 178 files in
> my "/usr/spool/uucp/Maps" directory and when a shell script called
> "/usr/lib/uucp/uugetmaps" is executed, pathalias is run with:
> /usr/lib/uucp/pathalias -i /usr/spool/uucp/Maps/* > /tmp/paths
> It complains that the "arg list too long" and terminates.

That complaint is presumably from the shell which finds that it cannot
build a sufficiently small argument list (exec() limits the size of the
combined environment/argument area).  The only long-term fix is an operating
system version with a higher limit (or no limit, preferably);  for the
short (and probably permanent) term, you could preprocess the files with
something like "cat d.* > D ; cat u.* > U; /usr/lib/uucp/pathalias -i D U"
(elaborate as necessary), or even "(cat d.* ; cat u.*) | pathalias -i".
As the pool of u.* files grows, you'll probably have to split them up also.
-- 
John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (508) 626-1101
...!decvax!frog!john, john at frog.UUCP, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw at eddie.mit.edu