First of all, thank everyone for helping me out with idiotic basic
questions.
Gordon Messmer wrote:
>
> 1) No, the programmers declared an array of 5 character pointers, not
> an array of 5 characters. Perl 5 doesn't have pointers, so I understand
> your confusion :) They're one of the things that non-C programmers
> bitch about. (If you don't understand pointers, using them is a quick
> way to a segfault).
Hee hee, perl doesn't have pointers, but it DOES have references. (But
they have some idiot protections WRT segfault.) The thing that is really
confusing about C's pointers is not the "they're memory locations"
thing,
it's the way they get shuffled back and forth with pointer or array
notation at the programmer's whim.
> 2) Yes, it's a list of up to five acceptable directories (or so it
> appears). The maximum size of each of these is not defined, but will be
> the maximum size of a command line argument. A pointer is an address in
> memory. Every program is passed two arguments to its main() function,
> an int and an array of character pointers. The programmers of tftpd are
> setting each of the pointers in their array to one of the arguments (if
> there are any arguments). By doing this, they reduce the risk of a
> buffer overflow by not copying their command line arguments into static
> buffers. They simply point their variables at the arguments already in
> memory, rather than duplicate them.
Ok, that was the actual question I was dancing around, so the
commandline
parser( I assume one of exec()'s brethren, whatever inetd is using) is
responsible for bounds checking these then?
> 3) Syntactically, the while loop is valid. Style is quite left up to
> the programmer. If you feel like writing code that looks like Perl, you
> can :)
> (I usually code fairly close to the GNU style guides)
I'm going to look those up right quick.
--
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Sam Bayne - System Administrator
North Seattle Community College
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (206)527-3762
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