Question about os::getenv()

[David Holmes]

Hi Jeremy,

On 5/03/2015 6:14 AM, Jeremy Manson wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> We had a request internally to make it so that JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS could
> accept something longer than 1024 characters.  See:
>
> Arguments::parse_options_environment_variable(const char* name,
> SysClassPath* scp_p, bool* scp_assembly_required_p)
>
> in
>
> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/jdk9/hotspot/file/27f0413cbea3/src/share/vm/runtime/arguments.cpp
>
> Would you folks be amenable to a refactoring so that getenv returns a
> newly allocated array with the contents of the envvar, which the caller
> has to delete?

I think this gets used too early in the VM startup to use the VM's 
allocation routines (ie with NMT support) - not 100% sure though.

But I think I have to agree with Martin and wonder why we have this 
copying interface around getenv, rather than using the result of getenv 
directly? Any code that really wants to modify the returned value can 
copy it for themselves. That would alleviate the hard wired limits.

getenv is available on Windows too.

David

> Jeremy