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PATHCHK(1)                               BSD General Commands Manual                              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 underly-ing underlying
         ing 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 com-ponent component
     ponent 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

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

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.

BSD                                             May 21, 2002                                             BSD