borman (06/25/82)
We are running 2.8 news, and recently some real weirdness was found. Here's the scoop: A user was reading news. Suddenly, halfway through, he hits a return to read the next article, and gets sh: My: not found Now, it happens that this is an article long enough to invoke the pager. We have written our own pager which is compiled into news. The string for PAGER is set to "My Own" at the start of readnews, and is only changed if the user has defined PAGER in his environment. Well, anyhow, I got a core dump, and went in poking around. When I looked at the PAGER string, it had changed to My@j@`wn that is, the " O" got changed to a CTRL/J and a NULL. Thus, when a strcmp was done with *PAGER and "My Own", it failed, and so it tried to popen "My\n". So, I understand why he got the shell message, but what I don't understand is how the heck the the string got changed in the first place! The fact that a "\n\0" was put on after the first word in the string makes me think that this wasn't a lost bit or something bizzare like that, but I can't figure out how it would have happened. I feel reasonably sure that it's not our pager, we've been running it for several months without any problems. Is there a routine somewhere that takes a string, finds the first whitespace, and changes it to a "\n\0"??? I did a massive grep for "\n", and didn't turn up anything interesting. (of course, with all the fprintf()'s flying by, I could have missed something...) Another thing: The other day someone else was reading news, and when he type a '-', it gave him back the same article. I thought I had fixed that with the fix I posted before, in header.c. (In fact, I had gone and read news before and after I installed that fix, and I was able to backup where I wasn't able to before, so his problem with not being able to back up came from someplace else) Of course, I could not duplicate either of these glitches. Has anyone out there run into this? or have any ideas on what or where readnews could be goofing? I've run out of ideas. -Dave Borman St. Olaf College ihnss!ihsp3!stolaf!borman harpo!stolaf!borman