Maximum character limit on {query} text passed to workflows

[theSquashSH 3]

This is a limit imposed by UNIX, not Alfred, but the error message shown is slightly confusing, and there should be a way to overcome this issue.

 

Right now, selecting more than exactly 260527 characters on my system and using it in an Alfred workflow (with the Argument:'selection in OS X' setting) as "{query}" will throw an error.

You can see your system's bash argument character limit with:

getconf ARG_MAX

Alfred should allow a way to pass the selection as stdin instead of a quoted and escaped string, otherwise there is no way around this hard limit, and Line-Counting workflows, etc. are useless for larger bodies of text.

 

^ Confusing error message when selecting too much text.

 

^ A workflow example that would trigger this.

 

echo "{query}" > .wordcount
echo "Characters: "$(wc -m < .wordcount)"  Words: "$(wc -w < .wordcount)"  Lines: "$(wc -l < .wordcount)
rm .wordcount

Edited December 1, 2014 by nikisweeting

[ctwise 132]

Most of the workflows that deal with large amounts of text use the pasteboard to pass the text around. Stdin would be awesome, but the pasteboard is a workaround.

[Andrew 829]

Sorry about the slow reply on this... this is something I'm aware of, but would take some framework overhaul which means it will be addressed in a major iteration cycle. Thanks for your patience!

 

Cheers,

Andrew