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From: hansen@pegasus.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Symbolic Links
Message-ID: <3028@pegasus.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 13:02:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: pegasus.3028
Posted: Mon Aug 31 13:02:27 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Sep-87 05:35:47 EDT
References: <8731@brl-adm.ARPA> <2789@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Reply-To: hansen@pegasus.UUCP (XMPE40000-Tony L. Hansen;LZ 3B-315;6243)
Organization: AT&T-IS Labs, Lincroft, NJ
Lines: 29
Keywords: .. chdir pwd
Summary: no limit in Korn's implementation

Eduardo Krell: <>, Ed Gould: <
<>You forget that there's a hard-coded maximum pathname length in the kernel,
<>so I won't be breaking anything that's not broken already.
< 
< You didn't read my program very carefully.  It didn't use any pathnames
< longer than about 7 characters, but changed into a directory whose full
< path name could have been many thousands of characters long.  The current
< restructions that I know about are for pathnames handed to a single system
< call.

I've read through David Korn's design memo on his proposed implementation of
symbolic links. Within it, he considers several possibilities:

    o	keeping the canonical path name for the current directory in the
	u-block, limiting the length of the current directory path to 1024
	bytes

    o	keep device/inode info for the current directory in the u-block,
	also limiting the length of the path to 1024 (or whatever) bytes

    o	storing only the current device/inode info for the current level
	of the current directory and using this to point into a shared
	system-wide table

The latter implementation, which he actually uses, does not limit the length
of the path of any directory to 1024 bytes.

					Tony Hansen
				ihnp4!pegasus!hansen, attmail!tony