On PATH_MAX

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Jonathan S. Shapiro" <address@hidden> writes:

> Speaking only for myself, I suspect that a PATH_MAX of 4096 is enough.
> This is because file systems whose paths are longer than this cannot, in
> practice, be managed successfully by real human beings, so the limit is
> not hit in practice.

I understand your point about the vulnerability induced by "long"
strings.  But really, setting PATH_MAX once for all must be very hard.
In the filesystem example, it turns out that not only human beings use
the filesystems: applications do sometimes use it in their own way,
regardless of human-manageability.  GNU Arch is quite famous in that
respect: it produces files and directories with (sometimes) awfully long
names...

Thanks,
Ludovic.