Hi Martin,
I spotted this report and realized that I already independently
added some of the information that Thomas Hood is talking about
in man-pages-2.00 (Dec 2004). I've just now amended that text
slightly to be more accurate.
I think Thomas probably thinks that setting seolved_path to
NULL means that realpath() will allocate a buffer that is always
large enough. This is not the case: it only allocates up to
PATH_MAX bytes.
The current text (as it will appear in man-pages-2.04) is:
NOTES
The glibc implementation of realpath() provides a non-
standard extension. If resolved_path is specified as
NULL, then realpath() uses malloc(3) to allocate a buffer
of up to PATH_MAX bytes to hold the resolved pathname, and
returns a pointer to this buffer. The caller should deal-
locate this buffer using free(3).
BUGS
Avoid using this function. It is broken by design since
(unless using the non-standard resolved_path == NULL fea-
ture) it is impossible to determine a suitable size for
the output buffer, resolved_path. According to POSIX a
buffer of size PATH_MAX suffices, but PATH_MAX need not be
a defined constant, and may have to be obtained using
pathconf(). And asking pathconf() does not really help,
since on the one hand POSIX warns that the result of path-
conf() may be huge and unsuitable for mallocing memory.
And on the other hand pathconf() may return -1 to signify
that PATH_MAX is not bounded.
Please close this report.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7
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