Manual Pages  — GETCONF

The first form of the command displays all of the path or system configuration variables to standard output. If file is provided, all path configuration variables are reported for file using pathconf(2). Otherwise, all system configuration variables are reported using confstr(3) and sysconf(3).

The second form of the command, with two mandatory arguments, retrieves file- and file system-specific configuration variables using pathconf(2). The third form, with a single argument, retrieves system configuration variables using confstr(3) and sysconf(3), depending on the type of variable. As an extension, the second form can also be used to query static limits from <limits.h>.

All sysconf(3) and pathconf(2) variables use the same name as the manifest constants defined in the relevant standard C-language bindings, including any leading underscore or prefix. That is to say, system_var might be ARG_MAX or _POSIX_VERSION, as opposed to the sysconf(3) names _SC_ARG_MAX or _SC_POSIX_VERSION. Variables retrieved from confstr(3) have the leading ‘_CS_’ stripped off; thus, _CS_PATH is queried by a system_var of "PATH".

returns a newline-separated list of environments in which the width of certain fundamental types is no greater than the width of the native C type long. At present, all programming environments supported by FreeBSD have this property. Several of the confstr(3) variables provide information on the necessary compiler and linker flags to use the standard programming environments described above.