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

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 01:49:03PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:

> 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

A wild thought, but if you want to count the words in the output can you
not pipe it to wc?  I haven't tried, this is just a thought...

-- 
richard