Does anybody know if there is a limitiation on the length of an
environment variable value. In particular I concerned about

Solaris 2.8, 2.9, 2.10

Thanks in advance to all who answer this post

2007-07-26, 13:47(-07), Stu:
> Does anybody know if there is a limitiation on the length of an
> environment variable value. In particular I concerned about
>
> Solaris 2.8, 2.9, 2.10
>
> Thanks in advance to all who answer this post

There's a limit on the combined size of the arguments and
environments passed in an execve(). So that incurs a limit on
the size of the environment.

You find though that most systems won't restrict you to do as
many and as big putenv/setenv(3) as you wish, but you'll find
then that you can no longer execute other commands. The libc
maintains a buffer (allocated dynamically) to store the
environment settings done via putenv/setenv, and that buffer is
used upon execl/execp/execv/excvp(3) to construct the envp
argument to the execve(2) system call.

Solaris is known to have a relatively (to other OSes) high limit
on that size. Linux was known to have a relatively low one. Hurd
is the only one that is known to have no limit at all to my
knowledge.

--
Stéphane