Query about <dirent.h>

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: Andy Tanenbaum <uunet!cs.vu.nl!ast>

In article <438 at longway.TIC.COM> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>You, the implementer, could manually replace that NAME_MAX with the
>appropriate value (perhaps found by inspecting <limits.h>). 

It is true I could just put 14 there, or #define it to be _NAME_MAX in that
file, but that seems poor programming practice.  If that constant ever gets
changed in <limits.h> but not in <dirent.h> disaster will strike.

>What I did in my implementation was to cheat:
>	char	d_name[1];

What happens when a program allocates a struct dirent in a program?  The
compiler will not allocate enough storage and it will crash when used.

Is it legal to add a line

#include <limits.h> 

in <dirent.h>?

Andy Tanenbaum (ast at cs.vu.nl)

Volume-Number: Volume 17, Number 69