of course!

[Martin Weitzel]

In article <1051 at root44.co.uk> gwc at root.co.uk (Geoff Clare) writes:
[first part deleted]
>The fact that the strcat() may write past the end of dir[] is more of
>a problem.  Another is that PATH_MAX might not be defined (it should
>always be obtained via pathconf() in portable applications).  Anyway,
>using a maximum length array is rather wasteful - malloc(strlen(path)+3)
>would be much better all round.

But then you should not forget to check the result (in a portable approach
you cannot assume these huge amount of memory, some people are used to
have - or ULIMIT may be set low in the environment, the program runs).
And of course: Don't forget to do a 'free'. And what should the programm
do, if there is no memory from malloc() - abort? The one who uses the
directory-check function might not like this ...

Ehhm, what was the original question? Something faster than 'access()'.
Seems to be the time to stop this now ....

MW