rather than allocating a PATH_MAX-sized buffer when the caller does
not provide an output buffer, work first with a PATH_MAX-sized temp
buffer with automatic storage, and either copy it to the caller's
buffer or strdup it on success. this not only avoids massive memory
waste, but also avoids pulling in free (and thus the full malloc
implementation) unnecessarily in static programs.
this avoids failure if the file is not readable and avoids odd
behavior for device nodes, etc. on old kernels that lack O_PATH, the
old behavior (O_RDONLY) will naturally happen as the fallback.
I intend to add more Linux workarounds that depend on using these
pathnames, and some of them will be in "syscall" functions that, from
an anti-bloat standpoint, should not depend on the whole snprintf
framework.
to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99
compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined
appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form
[restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the
original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
clean and simple, but fails when the caller does not have permissions
to open the file for reading or when /proc is not available. i may
replace this with a full implementation later, possibly leaving this
version as an optimization to use when it works.
Rich Felker