How to implement readlink to find the path

Question

Using the readlink function used as a solution to How do I find the location of the executable in C?, how would I get the path into a char array? Also, what do the variables

Answer 1

char *
readlink_malloc (const char *filename)
{
  int size = 100;
  char *buffer = NULL;

  while (1)
    {
      buffer = (char *) xrealloc (buffer, size);
      int nchars = readlink (filename, buffer, size);
      if (nchars < 0)
        {
          free (buffer);
          return NULL;
        }
      if (nchars < size)
        return buffer;
      size *= 2;
    }
}

Taken from: http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/glibc/libc_279.html