Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: Changes to the filesystem while find is running - comments?


From: Casper.Dik () Sun COM
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 18:29:08 +0100


I am genuinely surprised that Solaris still has such a
relatively small PATH_MAX.  Linux has 4096.

Really, there are things you cannot change because of
binary compatibility.  PATH_MAX is one.

Having a 4K path seems rather pointless; the longest path on my
system is 225 bytes; a factor of 4 over that borders on the ridiculous.

Like other arbitrary system limits of its ilk, PATH_MAX
is evil, and is one of the more persuasive arguments for
getting rid of the C language and its fixed-size
stack-allocated buffers.


char path[PATH_MAX];  /* considered harmful */

Evil, yes, but old source code never dies.

Casper


Current thread: