re: FUP ate my db

• Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 21:17:13 PDT
• From:
  ThwartedEfforts <abakun@forney.scinc.com>
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>At 02:40 PM 5/25/96 PDT, dg@dcs.st-and.ac.uk wrote:
>>I'd just like to point out a `small' bug in FUP... if you try and fileread()
>>a directory, it just keeps reading, and reading, and reading, and locks the 
>>server up, and eventually runs out of memory and the server panics and dumps 
>>db:

This might be obvious, but why the hell would someone try to read a directory? :)

>yeah I know, it also locks up if you try to read/write a file with ; or : in
>it... you could make a wrapper in $bf_fileread() (and all the other ones
>too) to check for that.

The above statement is bogus:

;filewrite("temp", "semicolontest", {"this is a line of text;", "this line ends in a colon:"})
=> 1
[used 6 ticks, 0 seconds.]
;fileread("temp", "semicolontest")
=> {"this is a line of text;", "this line ends in a colon:"}
[used 5 ticks, 0 seconds.]

And, of course, I checked the FILENAMES also, and it is true, FUP strips certain characters
from FILENAMES, which makes sense.  It does this so you don't end up with a file that idiots
will have problems with when trying to manlipulate from the shell.  In UNIX, ; is special,
and you'd have to escape it.  Thusly, we'd be reading messages like "I wrote out a file with
FUP with a semicolon in it, and I can't delete it from the UNIX prompt".  Colons are special
on Macs.  There are a whole bunch of characters that are removed.
Altho, perhaps it should raise E_INVARG or something.

>...just did some checks. FUP appears to strip out : and ; most of the time. 
>Sometimes I get Invalid Indirection (FUP says Error 0). What does this mean, 
>anyway?

Most of the time?  It strips the special chars all the time for me when the special
characters appear in the FILENAMES.  I can not reproduce this.  I can not get FUP to
raise E_INVIND.

Andy.

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