I noticed that a significant difference between other getpass implementations and glibc/gnulib's is that the latter allocate the output buffer.
This makes the gnulib 'getpass' module (not the 'getpass-gnu' module) rather difficult to use: how do you know whether to de-allocate the returned string or not? It depends on whether the system function or the gnulib replacement was used. Another way of looking at this is that there is a memory leak in the gnulib 'getpass' module. As a minimum, the following seemed appropriate. Ok to apply, Jim? /Simon diff --git a/doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi b/doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi index b805cf5..561b89c 100644 --- a/doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi +++ b/doc/glibc-functions/getpass.texi @@ -6,6 +6,13 @@ Gnulib module: --- Portability problems fixed by Gnulib: @itemize [EMAIL PROTECTED] +This implementation returns password of arbitrary length, other +implementations truncate it to PASS_MAX or 8 characters. [EMAIL PROTECTED] +This implementation allocate the password using malloc, other +implementations may return a pointer to a static buffer which must not +be de-allocated. @end itemize Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib: diff --git a/modules/getpass-gnu b/modules/getpass-gnu index af493f9..5093338 100644 --- a/modules/getpass-gnu +++ b/modules/getpass-gnu @@ -1,5 +1,6 @@ Description: -getpass() function: read a password of arbitrary length from /dev/tty. +getpass() function: read a password of arbitrary length from /dev/tty +and allocate output. Files: lib/getpass.h
