Bash PATH length restrictions

Inside a particular quarantine is all of the stuff one needs to run an application (bin, share, lib, etc.). Ideally, the quarantine has no leaks, which m开发者_运维问答eans it's not relying on any code outside of itself on the system. A quarantine can be defined as a set of executables (and some environment settings needed to make them run).

I think it will be beneficial to separate the built packages enough such that upgrading to a newer version of the quarantine won't require rebuilding the whole thing. I'll be able to update just a few packages, and then the new quarantine can use some of old parts and some of the new parts.

One issue I'm wondering about is the environment variables I'll be setting up to use a particular quarantines.

Is there a hard limit on how big PATH can be? (either in number of characters, or in the number of directories it contains) Does path length affect performance?

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There's a hard limit. It's something like 32MB.

Yes, you can get it long enough to affect performance easily. Number of entries is the primary limiting factor, followed by number of / characters (this should not show itself unless the path depth exceeds some outrageous number like 30).