Two serious csh bugs

[Randy Gobbel <gobbel@cogsci.ucsd.edu>]

I found not one but two rather gross bugs in /bin/csh.  The incredibly bizarre
symptom (on my system) is that if you try to run csh while cd'ed to a
subdirectory of your home directory whose full pathname is exactly 28
characters long, csh dies with a segmentation fault.  Thanks to Bruce Perens'
wonderful Electric Fence utility, it was pretty quick to track this down to a
problem with s_strncmp (strncmp for short strings) which causes it to return
"no match" for the case where the first string is an initial substring of the
second, plus a malloc in dcanon that allocates one Char fewer than it should.
Here are the fixes:

*** /tmp/str.c.orig	Thu Sep 26 12:35:25 1996
--- /tmp/str.c	Thu Sep 26 12:35:25 1996
***************
*** 338,343 ****
--- 338,345 ----
       * negative collate low against normal characters but high against the
       * end-of-string NUL.
       */
+     if (n == 0)
+       return(0);
      if (*str1 == '\0' && *str2 == '\0')
  	return (0);
      else if (*str1 == '\0')

*** /tmp/dir.c.orig	Thu Sep 26 12:35:59 1996
--- /tmp/dir.c	Thu Sep 26 12:35:59 1996
***************
*** 876,882 ****
  	     */
  	    p2 = cp + Strlen(p2);
  	    sp = newcp = (Char *) xmalloc((size_t)
! 					  ((cc + Strlen(p2)) * sizeof(Char)));
  	    while (*p1)
  		*sp++ = *p1++;
  	    while (*p2)
--- 876,882 ----
  	     */
  	    p2 = cp + Strlen(p2);
  	    sp = newcp = (Char *) xmalloc((size_t)
! 					  ((cc + Strlen(p2) + 1) * sizeof(Char)));
  	    while (*p1)
  		*sp++ = *p1++;
  	    while (*p2)


These patches are relative to the sources on the I-Connect Debian 1.1 CD.  It
seems likely that these bugs are present in standard versions of csh on many
systems, not just Debian and perhaps not just Linux.  Is there a good place to
forward this bug report in addition to the Debian list?

-Randy
-- 
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