This has been a known issue for a long time. Example:
printf "word" > /dev/full
wouldn't report there's not enough space on the device.
This is due to the fact that every libc has internal buffers
for stdout which store fragments of written data until they reach
a certain size or on some callback to flush them all at once to the
kernel.
You can force the libc to flush them with fflush(). In case flushing
fails, you can check the return value of fflush() and report an error.
However, previously, sbase didn't have such checks and without fflush(),
the libc silently flushes the buffers on exit without checking the errors.
No offense, but there's no way for the libc to report errors in the exit-
condition.
GNU coreutils solve this by having onexit-callbacks to handle the flushing
and report issues, but they have obvious deficiencies.
After long discussions on IRC, we came to the conclusion that checking the
return value of every io-function would be a bit too much, and having a
general-purpose fclose-wrapper would be the best way to go.
It turned out that fclose() alone is not enough to detect errors. The right
way to do it is to fflush() + check ferror on the fp and then to a fclose().
This is what fshut does and that's how it's done before each return.
The return value is obviously affected, reporting an error in case a flush
or close failed, but also when reading failed for some reason, the error-
state is caught.
the !!( ... + ...) construction is used to call all functions inside the
brackets and not "terminating" on the first.
We want errors to be reported, but there's no reason to stop flushing buffers
when one other file buffer has issues.
Obviously, functionales come before the flush and ret-logic comes after to
prevent early exits as well without reporting warnings if there are any.
One more advantage of fshut() is that it is even able to report errors
on obscure NFS-setups which the other coreutils are unable to detect,
because they only check the return-value of fflush() and fclose(),
not ferror() as well.
pathconf() is just an insane interface to use. All sane operating-
systems set sane values for PATH_MAX. Due to the by-runtime-nature of
pathconf(), it actually weakens the programs depending on its values.
Given over 3 years it has still not been possible to implement a sane
and easy to use apathmax()-utility-function, and after discussing this
on IRC, we'll dump this garbage.
We are careful enough not to overflow PATH_MAX and even if, any user
is able to set another limit in config.mk if he so desires.
It has become a common idiom in sbase to check strlcat() and strlcpy()
using
if (strl{cat, cpy}(dst, src, siz) >= siz)
eprintf("path too long\n");
However, this was not carried out consistently and to this very day,
some tools employed unchecked calls to these functions, effectively
allowing silent truncations to happen, which in turn may lead to
security issues.
To finally put an end to this, the e*-functions detect truncation
automatically and the caller can lean back and enjoy coding without
trouble. :)
For loop detection, a history is mandatory. In the process of also
adding a flexible struct to recurse, the recurse-definition was moved
to fs.h.
The motivation behind the struct is to allow easy extensions to the
recurse-function without having to change the prototypes of all
functions in the process.
Adding flags is really simple as well now.
Using the recursor-struct, it's also easier to see which defaults
apply to a program (for instance, which type of follow, ...).
Another change was to add proper stat-lstat-usage in recurse. It
was wrong before.
While auditing du(1) I realized that there's no way the over 100 lines
of procedures in du() would pass the audit.
Instead, I decided to rewrite this section using recurse() from libutil.
However, the issue was that you'd need some kind of payload to count
the number of bytes in the subdirectories and use them in the higher
hierarchies.
The solution is to add a "void *data" data pointer to each recurse-
function-prototype, which we might also be able to use in other
recurse-applications.
recurse() itself had to be augmented with a recurse_samedev-flag, which
basically prevents recurse from leaving the current device.
Now, let's take a closer look at the audit:
1) Removing the now unnecessary util-functions push, pop, xrealpath,
rename print() to printpath(), localize some global variables.
2) Only pass the block count to nblks instead of the entire stat-
pointer.
3) Fix estrtonum to use the minimum of LLONG_MAX and SIZE_MAX.
4) Use idiomatic argv+argc-loop
5) Report proper exit-status.
After a short correspondence with Otto Moerbeek it turned out
mallocarray() is only in the OpenBSD-Kernel, because the kernel-
malloc doesn't have realloc.
Userspace applications should rather use reallocarray with an
explicit NULL-pointer.
Assuming reallocarray() will become available in c-stdlibs in the
next few years, we nip mallocarray() in the bud to allow an easy
transition to a system-provided version when the day comes.
A function used only in the OpenBSD-Kernel as of now, but it surely
provides a helpful interface when you just don't want to make sure
the incoming pointer to erealloc() is really NULL so it behaves
like malloc, making it a bit more safer.
Talking about *allocarray(): It's definitely a major step in code-
hardening. Especially as a system administrator, you should be
able to trust your core tools without having to worry about segfaults
like this, which can easily lead to privilege escalation.
How do the GNU coreutils handle this?
$ strings -n 4611686018427387903
strings: invalid minimum string length -1
$ strings -n 4611686018427387904
strings: invalid minimum string length 0
They silently overflow...
In comparison, sbase:
$ strings -n 4611686018427387903
mallocarray: out of memory
$ strings -n 4611686018427387904
mallocarray: out of memory
The first out of memory is actually a true OOM returned by malloc,
whereas the second one is a detected overflow, which is not marked
in a special way.
Now tell me which diagnostic error-messages are easier to understand.
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
The HLP-changes to sbase have been a great addition of functionality,
but they kind of "polluted" the enmasse() and recurse() prototypes.
As this will come in handy in the future, knowing at which "depth"
you are inside a recursing function is an important functionality.
Instead of having a special HLP-flag passed to enmasse, each sub-
function needs to provide it on its own and can calculate results
based on the current depth (for instance, 'H' implies 'P' at
depth > 0).
A special case is recurse(), because it actually depends on the
follow-type. A new flag "recurse_follow" brings consistency into
what used to be spread across different naming conventions (fflag,
HLP_flag, ...).
This also fixes numerous bugs with the behaviour of HLP in the
tools using it.
1) val is sufficient as "int" (read the standard)
2) BUGFIX: If getpriority fails, it returns -1 and sets errno.
Previously, it would correctly catch the errno but not take
care of the fact that by then val has been decremented by 1.
Only change val if the getpriority-call has been successful.
3) Add LIMIT()-macro from st to increase readability.
4) setpriority returns < 0 on failure
5) Remove bikeshedding-comment. Read the standard if you wonder.
6) return-value trick from env(1)
- for octal input: reset mode to 0.
- take umask into account.
- make '=rwx' etc work.
- we wont support crazy but valid modes like "a+rw,g=x,o=g"
- uudecode: use parsemode, mask is 0.
Signed-off-by: Hiltjo Posthuma <hiltjo@codemadness.org>
