[gnu.utils.bug] ar bug

miller@pavo.SRC.Honeywell.COM (Steven M. Miller) (05/12/89)

ar.c provided with the binutils distribution has some problems with 
dereferencing null pointers.

The strcmp at line 1523 in ar.c compares tail->info.name with "__.SYMDEF"
Unfortunately tail->info.name can apparently be a null pointer which
causes ar to fail on Suns and probably a lot of other machines.
I hacked in a fix to check for a null pointer at that point in the file and
ar appears to work now, but the maintainer of this should probably check for
other cases where this can happen.

-Steve