-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Jim Meyering on 1/28/2008 6:28 AM: | | Thanks for the suggestion, but that introduces a new way for | dd to fail: strdup returning NULL would often lead to a segfault. | Even if it were to use xstrdup, to avoid that, I don't think it's | justifiable solely in order to preserve ps' view of the dd command line.
However, it IS justifiable by the fact that POSIX requires applications to treat argv[] as constant (ie. modifying argv in-place is not standards-compliant). True, most systems let you get away with modifications (in particular, think about getopt_long's behavior), but it would matter if we ever port coreutils to a system that follows the POSIX permission to insist on no modifications to the original argv and contents. http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/execl.html "The statement about argv[] and envp[] being constants is included to make explicit to future writers of language bindings that these objects are completely constant. Due to a limitation of the ISO C standard, it is not possible to state that idea in standard C." - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHndxM84KuGfSFAYARAs3KAKCxWmw5NFWQJON3I683GauhAkczWgCfXmrv gXNRWZ9coMJIbEcBOH7GX+8= =1fIr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
