Fw: File name too long problem -- maybe fix coming?

Eric Blake ebb9@byu.net
Wed Jan 9 14:29:00 GMT 2008


According to Dave Korn on 1/9/2008 7:19 AM:
>   Another reason to keep PATH_MAX lower is that people tend to be pretty free
> about declaring auto (stack local) char arrays of that size;

Which is inherently non-portable (consider GNU/Hurd, where PATH_MAX is 
intentionally undefined because there is no limit), but yes, there is a 
lot of non-portable code out there with bad assumptions.  It's probably 
even worse on cygwin (one of my cygwin-specific coreutils hacks uses such 
an array for converting between POSIX and Windows names for detecting 
case-insensitive renames, although I at least guarded it with preprocessor 
magic to warn me if PATH_MAX ever grew larger).

-- 
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             ebb9@byu.net



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