Good idea! I just wrote the following and am executing it as we speak (it's at 1_400_000 right now):
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $l=600_000;
while (1) {
print "\rTesting $l...";
open OUT,">biglines.txt" || die;
print OUT "x" x $l;
close OUT;
open IN,"<biglines.txt" || die;
my $r=<IN>;
close IN;
if (length($r)!=$l) {
print "Oops! A linelength of $l fails!!\n";
exit;
}
$l+=5000;
}
It doesn't have good resolution, but it would take it years to try all the possible lengths.
(12:01pm EST) Addendum: well, it's up to 25_000_000 characters on a line and still no problems!
(2:28pm EST) Well, I finally stopped it from executing at approximately 65MB per line :) At this point I'd say that there is no theorectical line-length-limit, at least under Linux. I would be interested, though, to see if Perl under NT lacks the same limitation.