Re: Portability issue with `putenv'

[James Youngman]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 08:24:07AM +0100, Tim Van Holder wrote:

> 3) I'm not 100% sure, but I _think_ it is allowed to
>    modify the string you passed to putenv later, and that
>    such changes will have effect on future getenv() calls;
>    that behaviour is broken by your version of putenv().

You're right, I hadn't thought of that.  According to the POSIX
standard (IEEE Std 1003.1, 2003 Edition),

  |  The 'string' argument should point to a string of the form " name=
  |  value ".  The putenv() function shall make the value of the
  |  environment variable 'name' equal to 'value' by altering an
  |  existing variable or creating a new one. In either case, the
  |  string pointed to by 'string' shall become part of the
  |  environment, so altering the string shall change the environment.


James.