Arch Linux

Description:

When you run a make command where one of the targets has a sufficiently large enough arg list, you get:

make: execvp: /bin/sh: Argument list too long

This is because in GNU make they don't split arguments to /bin/sh in their $(shell) directive, so it's just /bin/sh -c "everything". This is running into MAX_ARG_STRLEN, and the debian patch definitely fixes it.

On debian they patch this to split along the pagesize so you can execute things of arbitrary length arguments. I've attached the patch that debian uses in their current package of make (4.0). My limits.h has things like stacksize set to unlimited, which means the following:

; getconf ARG_MAX
4611686018427387903
; cat /usr/include/linux/limits.h | grep ARG_MAX
#define ARG_MAX 131072 /* # bytes of args + environ for exec() */
; grep -HIins MAX_ARG_STRLEN /usr/include/linux/binfmts.h
/usr/include/linux/binfmts.h:10: * execve() system call. MAX_ARG_STRLEN is essentially random but serves to
/usr/include/linux/binfmts.h:14:#define MAX_ARG_STRLEN (PAGE_SIZE * 32)
; cat > test.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int
main() {
printf("ARG_MAX: %ld\n", sysconf(_SC_ARG_MAX));
printf("PAGESIZE: %ld\n", sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE));
}
^D
; gcc test.c && ./a.out
ARG_MAX: 4611686018427387903
PAGESIZE: 4096
;


Additional info:
make 4.1-1

Steps to reproduce:
Create a makefile with the following contents:

---
ALL_FILES := $(shell / -type f)
ECHO_FILES := echo $(ALL_FILES) | fmt -1

all: $(shell /bin/bash $(ECHO_FILES))
ls /
---

Name it 'makefile.test' or something, and then run:

make -f makefile.test all

And you'll see it print the error message.

I'm also filing a bug against upstream (gnu make), but I don't know their bug policies or how likely they'll be fixing this. Will post a link as a comment to the issue once I have it.