tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen) (04/13/89)
I have found a bug in finger in HP-UX 6.21 (maybe everybody else reading this group already knows this, but it isn't mentioned in the man pages): finger <name> dumps core if there is a word longer than 19 characters in the Full Name -field in /etc/passwd of any user except the one being fingered. The total length of the field doesn't matter, it's just 20 or more consecutive characters without spaces or commas that cause it. I hope this will be fixed in 6.5 (at least a warning in tha man page would be appropriate). And in case you were wondering: Yes, there are names (and other words) longer than 20 letters in some languages, including Finnish. (I can easily think of a 25-letter proper name, and names of projects, titles &c seem to grow without bound. Besides, Finnish isn't even the worst in this respect, so perhaps the code could be revised to handle arbitrarily long words properly or at least truncate them instead of dumping core?) -- Tapani Tarvainen BitNet: tarvainen@finjyu Internet: tarvainen@jylk.jyu.fi -- OR -- tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi
rml@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Bob Lenk) (04/17/89)
I understand that this is being fixed, not for 6.5 (which is already released), but for the following release. Bob Lenk (rml@hpfcla) This is not an official statement from Hewlett-Packard, nor a commitment of any kind. It is simply an observation from an individual.