From: Brandon S. Allbery (bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org)
Date: 03/30/93 

From: bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org (Brandon S. Allbery)
Subject: Re: Process protection and Debugging.
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1993 02:29:20 GMT

In article <1993Mar28.001503.2991@meolyon.hanse.de> amylaar@meolyon.hanse.de (Joern Rennecke) writes:
>Hmm, I think it's less resource consuming to let the page fault occur
>in the rare cases where the software passes NULL pointers, and
>have the option to emulate reading 0 - or maybe an error string - if
>the offending code was one of said libc functions.

Passing 0 to a function expecting a string pointer is nonportable. Many *ixes
will SIGSEGV the process; others (and not just Linux) will let it go but the
value pointed to is *not* the 0-byte BSD puts there.

Frankly, programs that do that *should* break: they're already broken, but
the OS "accomodates" such broken-ness to make lazy programmers happy.

++Brandon 

-- 
Brandon S. Allbery                                       bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org

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