RE: On PATH_MAX

[Christopher Nelson]

> "Alfred M\. Szmidt" <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Make it possible to set the amount a user is able to 
> allocate instead 
> > of setting any kind of static limit that is impossible to get away 
> > from without recompiling the whole system.
> >
> > Arbitrary limits are poor software design, and have always been.
> 
> I tend to agree here.  :-)
> 
> Whether the OS architect likes it or not, applications that 
> use the file system the way GNU Arch does _do_ exist.  And 
> it's not up to the OS architect to decide whether they should 
> exist at all.

If you want an operating system that let's you do whatever you want, you should 
just stick with DOS. ;-)  More seriously, if you wish to be actively hostile, 
what is stopping you from creating a path as large as available memory and 
passing it across the protection boundary?  Such an act would cause severe 
denial of resource as the system thrashes it's swap and spends quite a long 
time parsing and breaking down the path.  It would likely cause the receiver to 
fail.  Even if the receiver restarts, the hostile app could wait for it to come 
back and retry the same operation.  Supporting arbitrarily large messages of 
that sort are dangerous in a silly way.  A reasonable limit is necessary.

-={C}=-