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    that's an excellent point - I've run into that before in tests. it gets to the point where only shell builtins run because the kernel cant load another executable - you end up dead in the water. Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 21:24
  • The argument list too long problem can easily be bypassed. It's not really worth mentioning here. Who would use /bin/echo when nearly every shell has a built-in version? Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 21:34
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    @mikeserv Well obviously everything stops working if you exhaust the memory in the machine. That's why I was making the assumption that wouldn't happen. It is only about 10 MB (100k iterations * 100 chars) of data after all and everyone has 10 MB nowadays. The problem isn't running out of memory. And as I explained, you don't need to put this 10 MB shell variable in any argument lists or environments. So what exactly do you think you are running out of? We aren't passing this 10 MB shell variable to db2 if that is what you are thinking because the question doesn't say that at all. Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 0:50
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    @mikeserv I'm sorry, that is not the case. You can see this yourself: foo='not in the environment'; envfoo='in the environment'; export envfoo; env | grep foo= and see what you can get. Only the exported variable is shown. I've looked at your links and nothing in them contradicts this. Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 0:59
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    @jw013 could you check unix.stackexchange.com/a/120842/12586 Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 1:05