8.1.4 Slow ‘checking the maximum length of command line arguments...’

Recent versions of Libtool need to know the maximum supported command-line length. Normally, configure determines this value by invoking a test script with successively longer command lines until such an invocation fails. On most platforms, the maximum command-line length is determined almost instantaneously. However, on one test system, a 600MHz x86 running the original—not GNU— Bourne shell under Solaris, ./configure was stuck ‘checking the maximum length of command line arguments...’ for approximately 45 minutes.

Inspecting the configure script revealed that the result of executing the length-checking code in configure is an assignment to the lt_cv_sys_max_cmd_len shell variable. Consequently, running ./configure lt_cv_sys_max_cmd_len=8192 (or some other conservative estimate of the maximum command-line length) caused ./configure to skip the unduly slow length-checking test and use the given value instead.