Re: [OT] Scripting question: the length limit of a list?

[Mike Bird <mgb-debian@yosemite.net>]

On Thursday 01 November 2007 13:07, Wei Chen wrote:
> I would like to write a bash script like the following one:
>
> for i in `some program that outputs a word list`
> do
>   echo $i
> done
>
> where the word list can be very very long. I wonder what is the upper bound
> limit of the length of word lists in "for" loop of a bash script, or
> does it only
> depend on the hardware (say, RAM)? Thank you in advance.

Assuming that the words are output one per line, something
like the following can handle lists of any size:

some program | while read i; do echo $i; done

--Mike Bird