Sorry, complete noob here. Why didn't you just cd into $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')? Why do you need to use the while loop for cd?

EDIT: got it. -bash: cd: a/a/a/....../a/a/: File name too long

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collinfunk 4 hours ago | parent [-]

No need to apologize at all. Doing it in one cd invocation would fail since the file name is longer than PATH_MAX. In that case passing it to a system call would fail with errno set to ENAMETOOLONG.

You could probably make the loop more efficient, but it works good enough. Also, some shells don't allow you to enter directories that deep entirely. It doesn't work on mksh, for example.

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dapperdrake 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Facetious reply:

> However, GNU software tends to work very hard to avoid arbitrary limits [1].

	▲	Joker_vD 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes? The quote says "tends to", and you still can cd into that directory, albeit not in a single invocation. Windows has similar limitations [0], it's just that their MAX_PATH is just 260 so it's somewhat more noticeable... and IIRC the hard limit of 32 K for paths in non-negotiable. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maxim...