Manual Pages  — PATHCHK

pathchk – check pathnames

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION EXIT STATUS EXAMPLES SEE ALSO STANDARDS HISTORY

pathchk [-pP] pathname ...

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, ‘amp;.’, ‘amp;-’ and ‘_’). No component may start with the hyphen (‘amp;-’) character.
-P
	In addition to the default or -p checks, write a diagnostic for each argument that: Is empty. Contains a component that starts with a hyphen.

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

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

    find . -exec pathchk -p -- {} +

The pathchk utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 ("POSIX.1").

A pathchk utility appeared in FreeBSD 5.0 .