I found not one but two rather gross bugs in /bin/csh. The incredibly bizarre symptom (on my system) is that if you try to run csh while cd'ed to a subdirectory of your home directory whose full pathname is exactly 28 characters long, csh dies with a segmentation fault. Thanks to Bruce Perens' wonderful Electric Fence utility, it was pretty quick to track this down to a problem with s_strncmp (strncmp for short strings) which causes it to return "no match" for the case where the first string is an initial substring of the second, plus a malloc in dcanon that allocates one Char fewer than it should. Here are the fixes:
*** /tmp/str.c.orig Thu Sep 26 12:35:25 1996 --- /tmp/str.c Thu Sep 26 12:35:25 1996 *************** *** 338,343 **** --- 338,345 ---- * negative collate low against normal characters but high against the * end-of-string NUL. */ + if (n == 0) + return(0); if (*str1 == '\0' && *str2 == '\0') return (0); else if (*str1 == '\0') *** /tmp/dir.c.orig Thu Sep 26 12:35:59 1996 --- /tmp/dir.c Thu Sep 26 12:35:59 1996 *************** *** 876,882 **** */ p2 = cp + Strlen(p2); sp = newcp = (Char *) xmalloc((size_t) ! ((cc + Strlen(p2)) * sizeof(Char))); while (*p1) *sp++ = *p1++; while (*p2) --- 876,882 ---- */ p2 = cp + Strlen(p2); sp = newcp = (Char *) xmalloc((size_t) ! ((cc + Strlen(p2) + 1) * sizeof(Char))); while (*p1) *sp++ = *p1++; while (*p2) These patches are relative to the sources on the I-Connect Debian 1.1 CD. It seems likely that these bugs are present in standard versions of csh on many systems, not just Debian and perhaps not just Linux. Is there a good place to forward this bug report in addition to the Debian list? -Randy -- http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~gobbel/ NOTICE: I DO NOT ACCEPT UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL EMAIL MESSAGES OF ANY KIND. I CONSIDER SUCH MESSAGES PERSONAL HARRASSMENT AND A GROSS INVASION OF MY PRIVACY. By sending unsolicited commercial advertising/solicitations (or otherwise on or as part of a mailing list) to me via e-mail you will be indicating your consent to paying John R. (Randy) Gobbel $1,000.00 U.S.D./hour for a minimum of 1 hour for my time spent dealing with it. Payment due in 30 days upon receipt of an invoice (e-mail or regular mail) from me or my authorized representative.