Documentation Archive Developer
Search
ADC Home > Reference Library > Reference > Mac OS X > Mac OS X Man Pages

 

This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

This manual page is associated with the Mac OS X developer tools. The software or headers described may not be present on your Mac OS X installation until you install the developer tools package. This package is available on your Mac OS X installation DVD, and the latest versions can be downloaded from developer.apple.com.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).



PATHCONF(2)                 BSD System Calls Manual                PATHCONF(2)

NAME
     fpathconf, pathconf -- get configurable pathname variables

SYNOPSIS
     #include <unistd.h>

     long
     fpathconf(int fildes, int name);

     long
     pathconf(const char *path, int name);

DESCRIPTION
     The pathconf() and fpathconf() functions provides a method for applica-tions applications
     tions to determine the current value of a configurable system limit or
     option variable associated with a pathname or file descriptor.

     For pathconf, the path argument is the name of a file or directory.  For
     fpathconf, the fildes argument is an open file descriptor.  The name
     argument specifies the system variable to be queried.  Symbolic constants
     for each name value are found in the include file <unistd.h>.

     The available values are as follows:

     _PC_LINK_MAX
             The maximum file link count.

     _PC_MAX_CANON
             The maximum number of bytes in terminal canonical input line.

     _PC_MAX_INPUT
             The minimum maximum number of bytes for which space is available
             in a terminal input queue.

     _PC_NAME_MAX
             The maximum number of bytes in a file name.

     _PC_PATH_MAX
             The maximum number of bytes in a pathname.

     _PC_PIPE_BUF
             The maximum number of bytes which will be written atomically to a
             pipe.

     _PC_CHOWN_RESTRICTED
             Return 1 if appropriate privileges are required for the chown(2)
             system call, otherwise 0.

     _PC_NO_TRUNC
             Return 1 if file names longer than KERN_NAME_MAX are truncated.

     _PC_VDISABLE
             Returns the terminal character disabling value.

RETURN VALUES
     If the call to pathconf or fpathconf is not successful, -1 is returned
     and errno is set appropriately.  Otherwise, if the variable is associated
     with functionality that does not have a limit in the system, -1 is
     returned and errno is not modified.  Otherwise, the current variable
     value is returned.

ERRORS
     If any of the following conditions occur, the pathconf and fpathconf
     functions shall return -1 and set errno to the corresponding value.

     [EINVAL]        The value of the name argument is invalid.

     [EINVAL]        The implementation does not support an association of the
                     variable name with the associated file.

     Pathconf() will fail if:

     [EACCES]        Search permission is denied for a component of the path
                     prefix.

     [EIO]           An I/O error occurs while reading from or writing to the
                     file system.

     [ELOOP]         Too many symbolic links are encountered in translating
                     the pathname.  This is taken to be indicative of a loop-ing looping
                     ing symbolic link.

     [ENAMETOOLONG]  A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an
                     entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.

     [ENOENT]        The named file does not exist.

     [ENOTDIR]       A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

     Fpathconf() will fail if:

     [EBADF]         fildes is not a valid open file descriptor.

     [EIO]           An I/O error occurs while reading from or writing to the
                     file system.

SEE ALSO
     sysctl(3)

HISTORY
     The pathconf and fpathconf functions first appeared in 4.4BSD.

4th Berkeley Distribution        June 4, 1993        4th Berkeley Distribution