NAME

pathchk — check pathnames

SYNOPSIS

pathchk

[ -pP] pathname ...

DESCRIPTION

The pathchk utility checks whether each of the specified pathname arguments is valid or portable.

A diagnostic message is written for each argument that:

• Is longer than PATH_MAX bytes.
• Contains any component longer than NAME_MAX bytes. (The value of NAME_MAX depends on the underlying file system.)
• Contains a directory component that is not searchable.

It is not considered an error if a pathname argument contains a nonexistent component as long as a component by that name could be created.

The options are as follows:

-p

Perform portability checks on the specified pathname arguments. Diagnostic messages will be written for each argument that:

• Is longer than _POSIX_PATH_MAX (255) bytes.
• Contains a component longer than _POSIX_NAME_MAX (14) bytes.
• Contains any character not in the portable filename character set (that is, alphanumeric characters, ‘ .’, ‘ -’ and ‘ _’). No component may start with the hyphen (‘ -’) character.

-P

In addition to the default or -p checks, write a diagnostic for each argument that:

• Is empty.
• Contains a component that starts with a hyphen.

EXIT STATUS

The pathchk utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

Check whether the names of files in the current directory are portable to other POSIX systems:

find . -exec pathchk -p -- {} +

SEE ALSO

getconf(1), pathconf(2), stat(2)

STANDARDS

The pathchk utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”).

HISTORY

A pathchk utility appeared in FreeBSD 5.0.