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>.