Calling './bitcoind decoderawtransaction' on big transactions

[running]

I want to go through blockchain to do some analytics, without reliance on external tools.

getrawtransaction -> decoderawtransaction worked so far, but I got stuck at this transaction

https://blockchain.info/tx/42f4500dec4c6f8cd41337767bdf7e2caa48c153ae2114334a645ac927d03766

When I try to pass it up to decoderawtransaction, it just tells me

Code:

Can't exec "/bin/sh": Argument list too long.

Now what can I do with that?

One possibility I could think of is just call blockchain.info API on those few transactions, that are giant, but I don't want to do that if I don't have to

The other possibility is digging into bitcoin source code and changing decoderawtransaction in rpcrawtransaction.cpp so it could read the transaction from a standard input.

Is there any other possibility?

[wumpus]

This is not a limitation of bitcoind, but of the shell.

The solution would be to make a small Python script that passes the transactions to the RPC API (for example, from stdin) instead of relying on the command line.

[running]

This is not a limitation of bitcoind, but of the shell.

The solution would be to make a small Python script that passes the transactions to the RPC API (for example, from stdin) instead of relying on the command line.

A-ha! Thanks!

Actually I now found out it's a kernel limitation, not bash one.

Anyway, for anyone else with the same problem finding this by chance: very simple scripts that do just what John Smith suggested are here on wiki

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_(JSON-RPC)