mkkam@menkae.cs.uh.edu (Francis Kam) (11/13/88)
I tried:
% finger @@@@@@@@@@@@@
on a sun 3/50 running SunOS4.0 and got as many finger processes running
as the number of '@' at the command line.
That might not be a bug, but quite undesirable to me.
-------------
Francis Kam CSC-3475
Internet: mkkam@cs.uh.edu Computer Science Department
mkkam@sun1.cs.uh.edu University of Houston
CSNET: mkkam@houston.csnet 4800 Calhoun
Phone: (713)749-1748 Houston, TX 77004.
(713)749-4791ddl@husc6.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani) (11/14/88)
In article <968@uhnix1.uh.edu>, mkkam@menkae.cs.uh.edu (Francis Kam) writes: | I tried: | % finger @@@@@@@@@@@@@ | on a sun 3/50 running SunOS4.0 and got as many finger processes running | as the number of '@' at the command line. | | That might not be a bug, but quite undesirable to me. If you find it undesirable, then don't type it. Sorry, I couldn't resist... In any case, this is not a bug but a combination of two features. For a long time the target of a remote finger could itself be a remote finger. This is extremely useful for getting to systems on different networks, e.g., finger @oz@xx.lcs.mit.edu when oz was a real chaos net host. In Sun OS 4.0, the null hostname appears to be treated as the local host so you see the @@@@ effect. In any case, please don't fix the former feature... Dan Lanciani ddl@harvard.*
guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) (11/16/88)
>In Sun OS 4.0, the null hostname appears to be treated as the >local host so you see the @@@@ effect. This appears to be generic to 4.3BSD; the routine "inet_addr" returns 0 when handed a null string. A null hostname gets passed to "gethostbyname", which quite reasonably says "no such host"; "finger" than tries handing it to "inet_addr", which returns 0 rather than -1. I don't see any reason why "inet_addr" shouldn't reject a null string - if there isn't at least *one* digit in the string, it's hard to see why it should be considered a valid Internet address specification.