>> Then again, if the pathname exceeds PATH_MAX you wouldn't be able to operate on it
>> anyway.
>
> Not really. As an example, you can open the first half of the path
> (still shorter than PATH_MAX) with open(), then pass the second half
> to openat().
That's similar to what Gambit is doing. But the OS won't let your
process allocate any more file descriptors, then you can't open() any of
the parent directories. The per-process limit can be set with `ulimit
-n` can be quite strict in some environments.