Bug#70762: textutils: tail segfault
On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 12:12:44PM +1100, Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 08:02:43PM -0500, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >
> > I guess the question is, at what point do we say, this is enough for
> > practical purposes, we'll stop here? Or is it "OK" to let tail consume
> > resources until it eats up everything and dies?
>
> That's why we have resource limits. The only bug here is that glibc
> mallocs in fprintf which means that we can't print out a useful error
> message when the memory is all used up.
[snip]
Why does it have to use fprintf? It's hard to imagine fprintf() not
requiring to malloc any buffers, since it *is* supposed to handle output
to files, and it has to parse & expand format strings, etc.. Perhaps the
real issue is that fatal error messages should not be output through
fprintf, but a special, last-resort output facility that doesn't require
extra memory.
T
--
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