Are shell variables limited in size? And which is the max size a variable can hold?
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Are shell variables limited in size? And which is the max size a variable can hold?
Yes they can be. It depends on your OS and/or the shell flavours and versions. It is safer to use temporary files if you expect variable values to exceed 1-4kB.
EDIT
Also see What is the maximum size of an environment variable value?; this deals with the OS limitation on total
environsize (cumulative size of allVARIABLE=VALUEs) which affectsexported variables, but the shell itself may have its own limitations re. all (including non-exported) variable sizes.This being said, unless you have portability in mind, GNU
bashis relatively good about not limiting (non-exported) variables’ sizes and can very likely hold arbitrary amounts of data as long asmalloccan find sufficient memory and contiguous address space. 🙂