The confstr function allows an application to determine the current setting of certain system parameters, limits, or options that are defined by a string value. The function is mainly used by applications to find the system default value for the PATH environment variable. If the following conditions are true, then the confstr function copies that value into a len-byte buffer pointed to by buf: o The len argument can be 0 (zero). o The name argument has a system-defined value. o The buf argument is not a NULL pointer. If the returned string is longer than len bytes, including the terminating null, then the confstr function truncates the string to len - 1 bytes and adds a terminating null to the result. The application can detect that the string was truncated by comparing the value returned by the confstr function with the value of the len argument. The <limits.h> header file contains system-defined limits. The <unistd.h> header file contains system-defined environmental variables. Also, confstr supports the following three HP-UX symbolic constants, which are added to header file <unistd.h>: o _CS_MACHINE_IDENT o _CS_PARTITION_IDENT o _CS_MACHINE_SERIAL