[Rd] any suggestions to deal with 'Argument list too long' for a R CMD check?

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Tue Dec 9 23:41:59 CET 2008


On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Whit Armstrong wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestion.  this package was building successfully
> until I split it up into smaller files.
>
> (there are 4489 files in the src directory)
>
> I suspect it's a hard limit in the linux kernel.
>
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6060
>
> since R CMD check is generating the actual commands that are passed to
> bash, it's a little out of my control (unless I write my own config
> script, which I do not want to do).

Well 'R CMD check' is not doing so: perhaps SHLIB called by INSTALL is.

What I suspect is happening is that there is a link command starting with 
'g++' that is too long.

POSIX requires at least 4096 arguments (which you will exceed), but Linux 
2.6 seems to have a limit of much more (unlimited in the current kernel, 
which yours is not, 32767 in 2.16.14).  It is more likely that you are 
hititng the length limit for the command line, and one way out is to use 
short file names.

One useful ref: http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax

Note that having all the functions in one file can help the optimizer, but 
there is another possibility, to have several files of closely related 
functions.


>
> -Whit
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Mathieu Ribatet <mathieu.ribatet at epfl.ch> wrote:
>> Just a suggestion. I googled for your error message you got e.g. "make ...
>> error 127" and I got
>>
>> Yeah, error 127 indicates that make can't find a program that it needs to
>> run a command.  My guess would be that she doesn't have g++ installed
>> (some distributions package it separately from gcc so it is possible to
>> have the c compiler installed but not the c++ compiler)
>>
>>
>>
>> Maybe it will be worthwhile to check if you have installed every required
>> header files or needed compilers/libraries.
>> But as I mentioned, this is just a suggestion.
>> Cheers,
>> Mathieu
>>
>> Whit Armstrong a écrit :
>>>
>>> I love xargs for all kinds of stuff, but I really don't want to write
>>> my own configure script.
>>>
>>> looks like simple solution is to recombine into one big source file
>>> rather than splitting each function out.  pita...
>>>
>>> -Whit
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Jeff Ryan <jeff.a.ryan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Never used, but I seem to recall that this was good for that:
>>>>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs
>>>>
>>>> Jeff
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Whit Armstrong <armstrong.whit at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Since, gcc was using upwards of 2gb of ram to compile my package, I
>>>>> just split all the functions into individual files.
>>>>>
>>>>> I guess I'm too clever for myself, because now I get hit with the
>>>>> "Argument list too long" error.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there a way to deal with this aside from writing my own configure
>>>>> script (which could possibly feed the gcc commands one by one).
>>>>>
>>>>> -Whit
>>>>>
>>>>> RHEL 5
>>>>> [whit at linuxsvr]$ uname -a
>>>>> Linux linuxsvr.kls.corp 2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 #1 SMP Wed Nov 5 09:00:19
>>>>> EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
>>>>>
>>>>> from 00install.out:
>>>>>
>>>>> * Installing *source* package 'RFincad' ...
>>>>> ** libs
>>>>> g++ -I/usr/local/lib64/R/include  -I/usr/local/include
>>>>> -I./RAbstraction -I./R.tslib.backend -I./tslib -fpic  -g -O2 -c
>>>>> aaAccrual_days_act252.cpp -o aaAccrual_days_act2\
>>>>> 52.o
>>>>> make: execvp: g++: Argument list too long
>>>>> make: *** [aaAccrual_days_act252.o] Error 127
>>>>> ERROR: compilation failed for package 'RFincad'
>>>>> ** Removing
>>>>> '/home/whit/dvl/fincad.utils/fincad.generate.R/RFincad.Rcheck/RFincad'
>>>>>
>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Jeffrey Ryan
>>>> jeffrey.ryan at insightalgo.com
>>>>
>>>> ia: insight algorithmics
>>>> www.insightalgo.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Institute of Mathematics
>> Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
>> STAT-IMA-FSB-EPFL, Station 8
>> CH-1015 Lausanne   Switzerland
>> http://stat.epfl.ch/
>> Tel: + 41 (0)21 693 7907
>>
>>
>>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


More information about the R-devel mailing list