On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Gisle Vanem wrote: > Simply running "openvpn -h" causes a SIGSEGV. I was hoping '-h' would > print the help, but obviously not. Happens with '-v' too.
Interesting bug. Basically "openvpn -h" is incorrect usage and should produce a basic options parsing error message, and in fact it does this on *nix, but crashes as you noted on Windows (openvpn --help will print the help). The crash traces back to a simple incompatibility between win and *nix. On Windows, socket descriptors are unsigned, on *nix they are signed. Commonly, -1 is used to denote an unopened file descriptor, but OpenVPN made the mistake of assuming that (fd >= 0) is sufficient to test for a valid fd. If fd == -1, then (fd >= 0) is only true if fd is a signed type (yeah C is crazy, if you say "unsigned int fd = -1;" then test for fd > 0, the test will be true). Because of the way the new management interface works on beta18, any early fatal error messages (such as due to command line option errors) will trigger this bug. I will fix for beta19. James
