On Jul 14 2025, Chet Ramey wrote: > One of the assumptions bash makes is that when the kernel tells it the size > of a regular file using stat(2), it's telling the truth, and that reading > fewer bytes than that when asking for the entire file indicates some kind > of problem.
That's a TOCTOU race. The file can change any time between stat and read. The only truth is that when read returns an error, there is an error. > Yes. It seems like that assumption isn't valid on Linux. It isn't valid anywhere. -- Andreas Schwab, sch...@linux-m68k.org GPG Key fingerprint = 7578 EB47 D4E5 4D69 2510 2552 DF73 E780 A9DA AEC1 "And now for something completely different."
