Stateless and I stumbled upon this issue while discussing the
semantics of read, accepting a size_t but only being able to return
ssize_t, effectively lacking the ability to report successful
reads > SSIZE_MAX.
The discussion went along and we came to the topic of input-based
memory allocations. Basically, it was possible for the argument
to a memory-allocation-function to overflow, leading to a segfault
later.
The OpenBSD-guys came up with the ingenious reallocarray-function,
and I implemented it as ereallocarray, which automatically returns
on error.
Read more about it here[0].
A simple testcase is this (courtesy to stateless):
$ sbase-strings -n (2^(32|64) / 4)
This will segfault before this patch and properly return an OOM-
situation afterwards (thanks to the overflow-check in reallocarray).
[0]: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man3/calloc.3
Consider the following code:
pw = getpwuid(uid);
if (!pw) {
if (errno)
...
else
...
}
If the entry was not found then as per POSIX errno is not set
because that is not considered to be a failing condition. errno
is only set if an internal error occurred.
If errno happened to be non-zero before the getpwuid() call
because of a previous error then we'll report a bogus error.
In this case, we have to set errno to zero before the call to
getpwuid().
However in ls(1) we only really care if the password entry was found
and we do not report any errors so setting errno to 0 is not necessary.
It actually makes the binaries smaller, the code easier to read
(gems like "val == true", "val == false" are gone) and actually
predictable in the sense of that we actually know what we're
working with (one bitwise operator was quite adventurous and
should now be fixed).
This is also more consistent with the other suckless projects
around which don't use boolean types.