perl: Argument list too long

sjhalani has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all,

we have a shell script from which we invove the perl i.e

a.sh
----
#!/bin/sh
[download]

we set a lot of environment variables here and then call perl script finally as :

$PERL_BIN/perl a.pl "$@" The perl script has the following first line i.e

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use lib (...)
...
Usual processing ...
[download]

But when we invoke it we get the error

a.sh bin/perl: Argument list too long

The arguments we are passing are way within the limits i.e not more than 400 characters then why is the perl complaining on the argument list ? This is running on Linux box.

Is there some limit on the number of environment variables we can set ?

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