From: thoth@uiuc.edu (Ben Cox) Subject: Re: Funny bug in 'strings' Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1992 03:33:28 GMT
fijma@cs.utwente.nl (Duco Fijma) writes:
>I encountered a bug in the 'strings' program, which was in the MCC 0.96c
>distribution. Like many other Unix programs, strings reads a list of files from
>its argv and does something with all these files. strings also includes argv[0]
>in this list, resulting in the program trying to list the strings in its own
>executable. When in directory /usr/bin, where strings is located, you see the
>strings from strings (pfeh...). When in another directory, it prints something
>like 'strings: strings: file not found'.
>It's not a very fatal bug, but I can't imagine nobody saw it before. Or did I
>missed a few articles in this group?
I found this bug, too, and it's easy to fix (I fixed it on my system
with this patch):
==================================cut=here=======================
*** strings.c.old Thu Jul 9 22:27:05 1992
--- strings.c Thu Jul 9 22:27:27 1992
***************
*** 126,131 ****
--- 126,132 ----
usage();
}
}
+ if ( !optind ) optind++;
argc -= optind;
argv += optind;
==================================cut=here=======================
Not the most elegant solution, but it works, and it's a one-liner.