[comp.unix.i386] UUX buffer limit

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.