confstr (3)
Leading comments
Copyright (c) 1993 by Thomas Koenig (ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de) %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this on...
NAME
confstr - get configuration dependent string variablesSYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h> size_t confstr(int name, char *buf, size_t len);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
confstr(): _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 2 || _XOPEN_SOURCE
DESCRIPTION
confstr() gets the value of configuration-dependent string variables.The name argument is the system variable to be queried. The following variables are supported:
- _CS_GNU_LIBC_VERSION (GNU C library only; since glibc 2.3.2)
- A string which identifies the GNU C library version on this system (e.g, "glibc 2.3.4").
- _CS_GNU_LIBPTHREAD_VERSION (GNU C library only; since glibc 2.3.2)
- A string which identifies the POSIX implementation supplied by this C library (e.g, "NPTL 2.3.4" or "linuxthreads-0.10").
- _CS_PATH
- A value for the PATH variable which indicates where all the POSIX.2 standard utilities can be found.
If buf is not NULL and len is not zero, confstr() copies the value of the string to buf truncated to len - 1 bytes if necessary, with a null byte (aq\0aq) as terminator. This can be detected by comparing the return value of confstr() against len.
If len is zero and buf is NULL, confstr() just returns the value as defined below.
RETURN VALUE
If name is a valid configuration variable, confstr() returns the number of bytes (including the terminating null byte) that would be required to hold the entire value of that variable. This value may be greater than len, which means that the value in buf is truncated.If name is a valid configuration variable, but that variable does not have a value, then confstr() returns 0. If name does not correspond to a valid configuration variable, confstr() returns 0, and errno is set to EINVAL.
ERRORS
- EINVAL
- The value of name is invalid.
ATTRIBUTES
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).| Interface | Attribute | Value |
| confstr() | Thread safety | MT-Safe |
CONFORMING TO
POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008.EXAMPLE
The following code fragment determines the path where to find the POSIX.2 system utilities:char *pathbuf; size_t n; n = confstr(_CS_PATH, NULL, (size_t) 0); pathbuf = malloc(n); if (pathbuf == NULL) abort(); confstr(_CS_PATH, pathbuf, n);