On Do, 26.07.18 08:07, Reindl Harald (h.reindl at thelounge.net) wrote: > arbitary numbers also don't help machines much and UINT64_MAX is a > random value making no sense - really - something like -1 but why in teh > world UINT64_MAX for something unset -1 and UINT64_MAX are kinda the same thing if you are talking about 64bit integers (which we usually do). It's mostly a matter of presentation. Using -1 or UINT64_MAX as marker for "not set" or "invalid" or similar concepts is pretty widely done across Linux APIs. For example, RLIM_INFINITY (the value used for unbounded resource limits) or MAP_FAILED (the error returned by mmap() on failure) are exactly that. cgroups exposes unbounded/unset attributes like this too. Hence, it's not a "random" value. It's common practice. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering, Red Hat