Config.pm and i

jackdied has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

my Config.pm as installed doesn't support the i_limits query. It is a stock debian system, perl 5.6.1

use Config qw/config_vars/;
print config_vars('i_limits');

prints
i_limits='define';
[download]

Which is not very useful. I'm trying to find the maximum size of an int on the system to pre-generate a small lookup table to put in a C header file. It does know the size of an int on the system (in bytes), so I could calculate MAX_INT from that. That seems like the kind of kludge that Config.pm was meant to prevent!

Anyone know what the deal is?
If I can't trust Config.pm to work accross systems, is there another hack that is more portable?

TIA,

-jackdied

Comment on Config.pm and i_limits Download Code

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Re: Config.pm and i_limits by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Aug 27, 2002 at 03:39 UTC
Config.pm's `i_limits = 'define'` means that perl is honoring the C library definitions from the standard header `limits.h`. To get those definitions available to perl, run `h2ph -a limits.h`. Afterwards, `require 'limits.ph';` [download] After Compline, Zaxo	[reply] [d/l] [select]