tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) (02/15/90)
As I play with these things quite a bit, I thought I'd point something out about UUX as distributed with AT&T Sys V/386 3.2, and no doubt other related unices. The local buffer for the 'command string' is limited to about 1K bytes. This is plenty for ordinary small mail and news stuff, but if you have a large mailing list and try to build a really huge 'rmail' command, you can run into it. When you do, UUX behaves *rudely* and blows up with strange error messages -- tries to read more addresses from stdin or something, probably bad string handling. Smail 2.5 originally started a new UUX command after every 128 bytes worth of addresses, but I had hacked it to use a much bigger buffer until I ran into this. Now I hold it off at < 1000 bytes. If anyone has a free clone of UUX they want to post, I'd love to see it. UUNET will handle 2K command lines, I'm told, and it's a shame to waste that capacity. Also if anyone's distributed HDB UUX for UNIX 386 has a bigger limit, let me know.
lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) (02/21/90)
In article <15171@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes: >Smail 2.5 originally started a new UUX command after every 128 bytes >worth of addresses, but I had hacked it to use a much bigger buffer >until I ran into this. Now I hold it off at < 1000 bytes. Smail used short lines for a good reason. Even if you hack *your* uux to take long arg's, it doesn't mean the next site down the line will be able to handle that long argument string. You're really asking for trouble if you use anything much over 256 bytes per command. -- Lyndon Nerenberg VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University {alberta,decwrl}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA UREP: Peru in disguise?