Maximum line length for a group

[Daniel Qarras <dqarras at yahoo dot com>]

Hi all,

not sure where I should be asking this so I thought to try this list.

On a system I'm working with users have been added to a popular group and now it seems that the line length for the group will exceed 2048 soon - could this be a problem? The reason I'm worried is that I see this:

localhost:~> getconf LINE_MAX
2048

on both RHEL4/Fedora 9 and there's few old bugs about this in RH bugzilla, some referring to a kernel limitation, although 'info libc' says:

 -- Macro: int LINE_MAX
     The largest text line that the text-oriented POSIX.2 utilities can
     support.  (If you are using the GNU versions of these utilities,
     then there is no actual limit except that imposed by the available
     virtual memory, but there is no way that the library can tell you
     this.)

Someone suggested to split the group to multiple lines, like:

group1:x:123:user1,user2,user3,...,userN

would become:

group1:x:123:user1,user2,user3,...
group1:x:123:userX,userY,userZ,...
group1:x:123:userL,userM,userN

That seems to work with some tools like ls group permissions but it brokes at least newgrp and sg. So splitting the group info in /etc/groups does not sound tempting but I would like to know for sure that are there any changes that something breaks if the line length grows above 2048? Initial testing did not reveal any problems with basic tools but of course one hour quick testing can't reveal all possible bugs that might be hiding..

Thanks!

PS. Please CC me in replies.