What is the maximum length of environmental macros?

[jiapei100]

Normally, I predefine my environmental macros in /etc/environment , such as PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.

I happen to put /usr/bin etc. at the very end of PATH, which leads to system crash, which finally reminds me of macro PATH shouldn't be TOOOOOOOOOOO long, right?

Anyway, after trivial modification, the problem solved.

Isn't it possible to have a long enough string (say: 65536 characters) for those 2 VERY important environmental macros (PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH) ?


Cheers
Pei

[TheFu]

The MAX PATH and maximum pre-allocated environment space are set at compile time.

The MAX_PATH is set for the kernel and last time I checked it was 4096. I remember the days when it was 256 characters and we had to build our own kernels for every system inside a control center to allow longer paths. If you follow "limits.h", I think you'll find this setting a few #includes deep.

I don't know where the max environment preallocated storage is. Could be set in the shell.

BTW, modifying system files when only 1 userid needs the changes is a terrible plan for many reasons. Mainly because system accounts for daemons are tested using those settings. Changing them like it seems you'd done can easily break things.