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Date:      Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:59:36 +0200
From:      Kostik Belousov <kostikbel@gmail.com>
To:        Nate Eldredge <nate@thatsmathematics.com>
Cc:        Alexander Best <alexbestms@wwu.de>, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav <des@des.no>
Subject:   Re: [patch] burncd: honour for envar SPEED
Message-ID:  <20091110165936.GC2331@deviant.kiev.zoral.com.ua>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.64.0911100756320.5432@zeno.ucsd.edu>
References:  <permail-200911101550071e86ffa800005ac8-a_best01@message-id.uni-muenster.de> <Pine.GSO.4.64.0911100756320.5432@zeno.ucsd.edu>

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On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 08:03:26AM -0800, Nate Eldredge wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, Alexander Best wrote:
>=20
> >ps: would be nice if strcasecmp could protect itself from segfault with=
=20
> >one or
> >both of the args being NULL.
>=20
> I disagree.  What do you think it should do instead?  Return 0?  If it=20
> did, would you have found your bug?
>=20
> The same argument could be made for any of the string.h functions, but I=
=20
> don't think it actually holds water.  Such checks add overhead, and only=
=20
> provide an illusion of safety.  Sure, strcasecmp could avoid causing the=
=20
> segfault itself, but at the cost of letting a broken program continue and=
=20
> possibly cause more damage.  It could call abort(), but then you'd just=
=20
> have the same result (program terminates) with a different signal, and=20
> doing your check in software rather than letting the MMU hardware do it.=
=20
> It could print a message, but that pollutes the program's output, and 15=
=20
> seconds debugging the core dump will reveal the problem anyway.
>=20
> Having a library function "protect itself" in this manner is not actually=
=20
> helpful, IMHO.

I remember System V to actually map zero page at 0, thus causing
all string functions to behave like it was supplied empty string
when argument is NULL. I believe Solaris still provides the library
that could be LD_PRELOADed for the same effect.

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