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ISO Limits

The limits defined by the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (“ISO C99”) standard are all compile-time limits. The numerical (integer) limits are:

All listed limits may vary across machines and operating systems. The standard guarantees only that the implementation-defined values are equal or greater in absolute value to those shown. The values permit a system with 16-bit integers using one's complement arithmetic.

Depending whether the system defines char as signed or unsigned, the maximum and minimum values are:

The two special cases, CHAR_BIT and MB_LEN_MAX, define the number of bits in char and the maximum number of bytes in a multibyte character constant, respectively.

POSIX Limits

The POSIX.1 standard specifies numerous limits related to the operating system. For each limit, a separate constant prefixed with “_POSIX_” defines the lowest value that the limit is allowed to have on any POSIX compliant system. For instance, _POSIX_OPEN_MAX defines the minimum upper bound permitted by POSIX for the number of files that a single process may have open at any time. This ensures that a portable program can safely reach these limits without prior knowledge about the actual limits used in a particular system.

As the limits are not necessary invariant, pathconf(2) and sysconf(3) should be used to determine the actual value of a limit at runtime. The manual pages of these two functions also contain a more detailed description of the limits available in NetBSD.

XSI Limits

Also the X/Open System Interface Extension (XSI) specifies few limits. In NetBSD these are limited to LONG_BIT (the number of bits in long), WORD_BIT (the number of bits in a “word”), and few limits related to float and double.