On 21 March 2011 10:47, Carlos Martín Nieto <cmn@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On vie, 2011-03-18 at 06:38 -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote: >> >> > It was pointed out elsewhere [1] that PATH_MAX only specifies max >> > length of a path element, not full path. I think we'd need to stay >> > away from preallocated PATH_MAX-sized arrays. >> >> No, PATH_MAX is actually the maximum length of a path, and when you >> use, say, open(2), it will fail if your path is longer than that. The >> maximum length of a path component on most filesytems is 255 or 256; >> PATH_MAX on Linux is 4096. >> >> It is indeed possible to have paths with length longer than that. The >> way to support that is to use relative paths wherever possible, which > > So what PATH_MAX describes is the maximum length of a string > representing a path, but not necessarily the length of the path itself. According to this at least, PATH_MAX is bogus: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/11/pathmax-simply-isnt.html I think the sane thing would be to never rely on a fixed max path length. -- /Lasse -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html