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>