[37484] in bugtraq
Re: Changes to the filesystem while find is running - comments?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Casper.Dik@Sun.COM)
Wed Nov 24 13:32:28 2004
Message-Id: <200411241729.iAOHT8Ma014096@vaticaan.Holland.Sun.COM>
From: Casper.Dik@Sun.COM
To: Martin.Buchholz@Sun.COM
Cc: James Youngman <bugtraq@excession.spiral-arm.org>,
bugtraq@securityfocus.com, bug-findutils@gnu.org, parimiv@deshaw.com,
srevilak@speakeasy.net, levon@movementarian.org
In-Reply-To: <41A4C40C.1050508@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
