VN_FULLPATH(9)

NAME
vn_fullpath - convert a vnode reference to a full pathname, given a process context

SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <sys/vnode.h>
int
vn_fullpath(struct thread *td, struct vnode *vp, char **retbuf, char **freebuf);

DESCRIPTION
The vn_fullpath() function makes a “best effort” attempt to generate a string pathname for the passed vnode; the resulting path, if any, will be relative to the root directory of the process associated with the passed thread pointer. The vn_fullpath() function is implemented by inspecting the VFS name cache, and attempting to reconstruct a path from the process root to the object.

This process is necessarily unreliable for several reasons: intermediate entries in the path may not be found in the cache; files may have more than one name (hard links), not all file systems use the name cache (specifically, most synthetic file systems do not); a single name may be used for more than one file (in the context of file systems covering other file systems); a file may have no name (if deleted but still open or referenced). However, the resulting string may still be more useable to a user than a vnode pointer value, or a device number and inode number. Code consuming the results of this function should anticipate (and properly handle) failure.

Its arguments are:

td  The thread performing the call; this pointer will be dereferenced to find the process and its file descriptor structure, in order to identify the root vnode to use.

vp  The vnode to search for. No need to be locked by the caller.

retbuf
    Pointer to a char * that vn_fullpath() may (on success) point at a newly allocated buffer containing the resulting pathname.

freebuf
    Pointer to a char * that vn_fullpath() may (on success) point at a buffer to be freed, when the caller is done with retbuf.

Typical consumers will declare two character pointers: fullpath and freepath; they will set freepath to NULL, and fullpath to a name to use in the event that the call to vn_fullpath() fails. After done with the value of fullpath, the caller will check if freepath is non-NULL, and if so, invoke free(9) with a pool type of M_TEMP.

RETURN VALUES
If the vnode is successfully converted to a pathname, 0 is returned; otherwise, an error number is returned.

SEE ALSO
free(9)

AUTHORS
This manual page was written by Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>.