What machines core dump on deref of NULL?
Conor P. Cahill
cpcahil at virtech.uucp
Sat Jun 30 09:26:56 AEST 1990
In article <412 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>Hey, wait just a minute here. I can't let such an erroneous error go
>unchallenged! Dereferencing a null pointer is quite definitely *not*
>an error, bug, mistake, or any other pejorative, in a great many sorts
>of applications.
>
>The trouble with generalizing to all C code is that C outgrew Unix
>about a decade ago.
HOWEVER, this is not comp.lang.c. This comp.unix.whatever and in this
context dereferencing a null pointer is, or should be, a no-no. Any
unix code that does, has at least 1 serious bug that should be fixed.
I remember one time when I was porting some code to a sun 3 and
ran across the following line of code:
if( strcmp(variable,(char*)0) == 0 )
I really wasn't sure what the original programmer was attempting to
check (since the first byte at 0 was a null byte on the original machine),
so I changed the code to be:
if( (variable == (char *)0) || (*variable == '\0'))
--
Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160
Sterling, VA 22170
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