honestly unless i missed something, i really don't get the lack of PATH_MAX in hurd
like, sure, the idea makes some sense, there's no inherent limit to a file path, any limit can be worked around by dirfds and relative paths, but the point of PATH_MAX is not a absolute limit, but a relative one!
a limit applied to syscalls because you really don't want to accept any arbitrary length in a input string and hang there parsing a 5 gigabyte string from a malicious program or smth
so either gnu hurd would have it's translation server hang on gigantic paths, or it has a PATH_MAX but pretends it doesn't
wicked witch of the unix
npub1f6…ps5qm
2026-06-19 19:36:37 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1f67qrzm95xe497g0jda70x6uxwr9ru2j39sg38axfj4ff05c979qmps5qmSeen on
wss://relay.ditto.pubPublished at
2026-06-19 19:36:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "honestly unless i missed something, i really don't get the lack of PATH_MAX in hurd\n\nlike, sure, the idea makes some sense, there's no inherent limit to a file path, any limit can be worked around by dirfds and relative paths, but the point of PATH_MAX is not a absolute limit, but a relative one!\n\na limit applied to syscalls because you really don't want to accept any arbitrary length in a input string and hang there parsing a 5 gigabyte string from a malicious program or smth\n\nso either gnu hurd would have it's translation server hang on gigantic paths, or it has a PATH_MAX but pretends it doesn't",
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