quoted

Interesting.  If you're exceeding your stack ulimit, you should be
seeing either an "argument list too long" message or getting a
SIGSEGV.  Have you tried bypassing wc and piping the output straight
to a file?

I think it sends SIGKILL on failure paths.

Setting stack limit to unlimited I managed to exec with 10MB, and
"wc" produced the correct output when it (finally) ran, so no
odd limits being hit in there.

Setting a lower (4MB) stack limit, and then increasing the
amount of args in 100K steps I saw this:

Up to an including 32 * 100K => works fine.

33:40 * 100K => no errors from the script, but wc reports "0 0 0"

40 * 100K => "/bin/echo: Argument list too long".

All this might be connected to ia64's confusing implementation
of stack limit (since we have *two* stacks ... the regular one
and the upward growing one for the h/w register stack engine).

Ah ... running the 34*100K case direct from my shell prompt, I
do see a "Killed" that must get lost when I run this in the
shell script loop.

-Tony