Why my 'ar.exe' and 'ld.exe' does not work with the inline parameter '@objectslistfile'

Felix Lee felix.1@canids.net
Thu Jan 15 06:14:00 GMT 2004


Felix Lee <felix.1@canids.net>:
> (should you be able to say @file within an @file?
>  my gut feeling is 'no'.
>  my other gut feeling is 'yes'.)

my non-gut-feeling is 'no', because @file is really just a simple
workaround for the inability to pass arbitrarily long argument
lists.  nesting/recursion would give the workaround too much
depth.  the shell already has this type of functionality.  adding
complicated arg handling to every program is as questionable as
adding file globbing to every program.  it's probably more
worthwhile to work on fixing the general arg list restriction.

(another thought: the shell and crt0 could collaborate on some
arg-passing convention that means "the real argv list should be
read from this file descriptor")

anyway, this is getting beyond the scope of binutils.
xargs is the traditional workaround, handles most cases.
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