Bug#1121061: libreoffice: undocumented limit of 249 arguments

[Francesco Potortì <Potorti@isti.cnr.it>]

>> Package: libreoffice
>> Version: 4:25.8.2-3
>> Severity: normal
>>
>> When libreoffice is called from the command line for batch processing with --convert-to it apparently forces a limit on the number of arguments without telling.
>>
>> In my case, when giving the names of 371 files on the command line, it starts working and printing two lines for each processed file until 249 files are processed, then it hangs.
>>
>> If I give it 249 file arguments, it works without problems.  The command line is:
>>
>> /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/oosplash --convert-to csv:Text - txt - csv (StarCalc):44,,,,,,,,,,,3 --outdir ./tmp.GYzB1YV6z1 [ 42-char file names]
>
>http://google.com/search?q=libreoffice+argument+limit+convert-to:
>
>"
>There is no specific argument limit for the libreoffice --convert-to command itself
...
>(AI, but..)

I investigated a bit, and that's what I found.

Bash does not have a limit on line length or number of arguments.  The operating system has a line length limit, and on my Linux box it is

$ getconf ARG_MAX
2505728

In the case I reported, the line length was about 43*371+123=16076.  Just for double check, ls on my entire directory takes 718 arguments without a problem:

$ ls -1 * | wc -l
719

which is what one expects from the Gnu core utils.

However /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice has a limit of of 254 arguments (including the process file name), and the reason is that it is a shell script starting with !/bin/sh, which on my system means that dash is called.  Experiments show that the limit on numer of arguments is imposed by Dash.  In fact, if one calls /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/oosplash rather than /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice then the limit disappears.

I suggest that the shell scripts under /usr/lib/libreoffice/program use Bash rather than Dash, and that the libreoffice-common package is made to depend on the bash package.

This is not a significant lack of efficiency, as the overhead of launching bash is negligible with respect to launching soffice from any point of view: cpu time, memory size, disk space occupied.

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