The Main web at TWiki.org has now over 7500 topics. Bash reports Argument list too long for the fgrep and egrep search. This renders Main.WebIndex, Main.WebChanges, Main.WebSearch and TWikiInstallations non-functional. For now I changed the "Changes" link to use the changes script instead of the Main.WebChanges topic.

This limitation was already reported in ArgumentListTooLong. Another limitation at TWiki.org is RcsFileSizeLimitation.

The Argument list too long problem can be addressed with the suggestion in ArgumentListTooLong. A workaround is to create a shell script that acts like fgrep and/or egrep and that does the xargs handling independently of TWiki.

-- PeterThoeny - 10 Sep 2003

This is now fixed, is in TWikiAlphaRelease and at TWiki.org. This is part of working on SearchTopicNameAndTopicText, ExcludeWebTopicsFromSearch, SearchWithNoPipe, InlineSearchArgListTooLong, SearchWebHasTooManyParameters, SiteMapIsSlow.

How: The Search module first gets all topics in a web, then calls the external grep with sets of up to 512 files at a time.

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Nov 2003