April 15, 2003 PATHCHK 1

### NAME

pathchk - check pathnames

### SYNOPSIS

pathchk [-p] 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.

### EXAMPLES

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

```find . -print | xargs 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 NetBSD2.0.