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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!taligent!uunet!news.mathworks.com!zombie.ncsc.mil!admii!cmcl2!newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu!starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu!localhost!gene From: gene@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu (Gene Stark) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Major strcmp bug under BSD 2.0? Date: 30 May 95 22:34:49 Organization: Gene Stark's home system Lines: 15 Message-ID: <GENE.95May30223449@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu> References: <3qfn52$188j@troy.la.locus.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.cs.sunysb.edu In-reply-to: sassan@locus.com's message of 30 May 1995 18:11:46 GMT >Am I imagining things or is there a bug in BSD 2.0's strcmp() function? >If either of the string parameters is NULL the program core dumps. >Isn't this a major bug? (Making the OS pretty much useless). Is there >a simple fix for this ? No, it is an example of a subroutine that only works under conditions that must be ensured by the caller. This is probably done for efficiency reasons: if it always checks if its arguments are NULL, then you pay every time, even if as a clever programmer you are able to guarantee without checking that you always pass non-NULL arguments. It hardly makes the entire OS useless... - Gene Stark