Bug#70762: textutils: tail segfault
On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 08:23:24AM -0500, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 04:00, Herbert Xu wrote:
>
> > > But the original bug seems to be more of an issue: shouldn't it be a bug
> > > that tail chews up infinite amounts of memory when it can't find an
> > > end-of-line char? IMHO, tail should just bail out when it finds a line
> > > which is more than, say 10MB long (I'm being generous about limits here).
> > > I mean, when there is no newline for 10MB's worth of data, is there even
> > > any usefulness to tail anymore? I just can't imagine any scenario where
> > > it'd actually do anything *useful*.
>
> > No, we should not impose arbitrary limits on applications.
>
> Sure, but it would also be reasonable to flush the buffer to the screen
> every (screensize/2) so that a human could follow it.
[snip]
Yes!! That's a *very* good idea.
Personally, I don't like the idea of imposing arbitrary limits on things
like line length either; but I was confronted with a program that was
consuming resources endlessly without doing anything useful. Flushing the
buffer once in a while is a very good solution to this.
T
--
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. --
azephrahel
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