[Swift-devel] problems with external dependencies

[Michael Wilde]

On 3/23/09 2:18 PM, Ben Clifford wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Michael Wilde wrote:
> 
>> Passing 2000 outputs from the simuation to the analysis routine causes
>> wrapper.sh to be invoked with values of DIRS and/or INF that exceed the max
>> allowed command line length (which I think is 128KB on the bgp).
>>
>> Its primarily the error causes by this length limit that Im trying to work
>> around here.
> 
> It might not be too hard to make wrapper.sh take its inputs from a file, 
> which would then scale much better. I've certainly thought about it 
> before.

Cool. Can you do the best-of-both-worlds, passing short to modest size 
lists as we do today, and only using files for INF and DIRS when they 
are very long?

Eg, if the first char of dirs is ` as in `listofdirs` then wrapper.sh 
reads them from file "listofdirs". Otherwise, I would fear that we're 
stepping backwards on the path of eliminating file operations in the 
app-calling path.

> 
> Would your app be able to cope ok if wrapper.sh did not have this problem?

Yes, I think so, but surprises are possible.

> (or would it also have the same command-line length problems?)

No, it avoided command-line length limitations from the start by only 
placing the first file name in the struct-array on the command line, to 
serve as a pattern for the script, which knows how to find the full set 
of files, by naming convention.