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.
We only allow decompression for extraction. Thus, it may be confusing
for the user and break scripts silently when the j- or z-flag are given
even though this is not supported.
I've been wanting to do this for a while now, as tar(1) used to
be one of messiest and cruftiest tools.
First off, before walking through the audit, I'll talk about
what the DIRFIRST-flag for recurse() does.
It basically calls fn() on the first-level-dir before calling
it's subentries. It's necessary here, because else the order
of the tar-files would've been wrong (it would try to create
dir/file before creating dir/).
Now, to the audit:
1) Update manpage, fix mistake that compression is also available
for compressing. It's only available for extracting.
2) Define the major, minor and makedev macros from glibc by ourselves.
No need to rely on them, as they are common sense.
decomp()
3) Simple refactorization.
putoctal()
4) Add a truncation check for snprintf().
archive()
5) BUGFIX: Add checks to any checkable function, don't blindly call
them, this is harmful and there are 100 ways to exploit that.
6) Use estrlcpy() instead of snprintf() wherever possible, fix
alignment.
7) BUGFIX: Terminate the result-buffer of readlink(), check if
it even succeeded.
8) Fix sizeof()-formatting.
unarchive()
9) BUGFIX: Add checks to any checkable function, don't blindly call
them, this is harmful and there are 100 ways to exploit that.
10) BUGFIX: strtoul can happily return negative numbers. Add checks
for that and also if the full string has been processed.
11) Remove calls to perror(). We have eprintf, use it.
12) BUGFIX: "minor = strtoul(h->mode, 0, 8);". We need h->minor of
course.
13) Fix typo "usupported", remove fprintf-call.
print()
14) Check fread().
xt()
15) Get rid of snprintf-magic. Use estrlcat().
16) BUGFIX: check for ferror() on the tarfile.
usage()
17) Update it. The old usage() was like 1000 years old.
main()
18) Add DIRFIRST-flag to the recursor.
19) Don't print usage() when a mode is re-set. We allow this in
general.
20) Add function checks and fix error messages.
21) Add tarfilename-global for proper error-messages.
Okay, why yet another recurse()-refactor?
The last one added the recursor-struct, which simplified things
on the user-end, but there was still one thing that bugged me a lot:
Previously, all fn()'s were forced to (l)stat the paths themselves.
This does not work well when you try to keep up with H-, L- and P-
flags at the same time, as each utility-function would have to set
the right function-pointer for (l)stat every single time.
This is not desirable. Furthermore, recurse should be easy to use
and not involve trouble finding the right (l)stat-function to do it
right.
So, what we needed was a stat-argument for each fn(), so it is
directly accessible. This was impossible to do though when the
fn()'s are still directly called by the programs to "start" the
recurse.
Thus, the fundamental change is to make recurse() the function to
go, while designing the fn()'s in a way they can "live" with st
being NULL (we don't want a null-pointer-deref).
What you can see in this commit is the result of this work. Why
all this trouble instead of using nftw?
The special thing about recurse() is that you tell the function
when to recurse() in your fn(). You don't need special flags to
tell nftw() to skip the subtree, just to give an example.
The only single downside to this is that now, you are not allowed
to unconditionally call recurse() from your fn(). It has to be
a directory.
However, that is a cost I think is easily weighed up by the
advantages.
Another thing is the history: I added a procedure at the end of
the outmost recurse to free the history. This way we don't leak
memory.
A simple optimization on the side:
- if (h->dev == st.st_dev && h->ino == st.st_ino)
+ if (h->ino == st.st_ino && h->dev == st.st_dev)
First compare the likely difference in inode-numbers instead of
checking the unlikely condition that the device-numbers are
different.
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.
Allows dropping a local variable if the explicit PID is not needed
and it makes it clearer what happens.
Also, one should always strive for consistency for cases like these.
Quoting POSIX[0]:
"Care should be taken, also, to call _exit() rather than exit() if exec cannot be used, since
exit() flushes and closes standard I/O channels, thereby damaging the parent process' standard
I/O data structures. (Even with fork(), it is wrong to call exit(), since buffered data would
then be flushed twice.)"
[0]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/vfork.html
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.
It actually makes the binaries smaller, the code easier to read
(gems like "val == true", "val == false" are gone) and actually
predictable in the sense of that we actually know what we're
working with (one bitwise operator was quite adventurous and
should now be fixed).
This is also more consistent with the other suckless projects
around which don't use boolean types.
POSIX recommends that "For backwards-compatibility, a typeflag value of
binary zero ( '\0' ) should be recognized as meaning a regular file when
extracting files from the archive".
When the tar file is written in one directory archived by tar
the function archive enters in an infinite loop due to de
tar file written. This patch avoid this case checking the
inode of the tar file before of adding it to the archive.
