That is a very good idea. POSIX has functions

      long pathconf(const char *path, int name);

      long fpathconf(int fildes, int name);

The problem is it is not very easy to know how long the filename can be.
I wish stat could give me some info. Only thing I can think of now is

1. create a file with very long filename (300 chars)
2. find out how many chars are valid.
3. delete the file and return that number.

But, I think that is not very nice.

-- 
H.J.
Gcc/libc maintainer for Linux.

In article <Aug.2.15.20.25.1992.25614@dumas.rutgers.edu>, hedrick@dumas.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes:
|> I think it probably is a good idea to supply a way to find the maximum
|> file name size on a file system.  For most programs it doesn't matter,
|> but programs that tack on a suffix would like to make sure that the
|> new name is really different from the old.  Otherwise foo~ or foo.Z
|> overwrite foo, This is an issue that SVr4 also has to deal with, since
|> they also have multiple file types, both sys5 -- with short names, and
|> ufs -- with long names.  Why not do it compatibly?  Implement statvfs.
|> One of the fields it returns is f_namemax, the maximum file name size
|> for the file system.