sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) (12/04/90)
The December issue of Communications of the ACM contains an interesting article, "An Empirical Study of the Reliability of Unix Utilities". The authors describe tools they wrote which would fire up various Unix utilities and send streams of random 8-bit junk at them. About 25% of the utilities studied either core dumped or hung. I found it to be very interesting reading and wanted to draw this article to the attention of any of you who might not read CACM. All Unix programmers could benefit by reading this article. Steve Hayman -- Steve Hayman Workstation Manager Computer Science Department Indiana U. sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (812) 855-6984 NeXT Mail: sahayman@spurge.bloomington.in.us
chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) (12/04/90)
In article <75972@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes: >... The authors describe tools they wrote which would fire up various >Unix utilities and send streams of random 8-bit junk at them. About >25% of the utilities studied either core dumped or hung. This is not entirely fair. Many Unix tools are programmable, and can be programmed to do stupid things (run forever or dump core). Of course, many are simply not able to handle `negative' characters. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163) Domain: chris@cs.umd.edu Path: uunet!mimsy!chris
cy5@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Conway Yee) (12/05/90)
In article <28282@mimsy.umd.edu> chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes: >In article <75972@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu >(Steve Hayman) writes: >>... The authors describe tools they wrote which would fire up various >>Unix utilities and send streams of random 8-bit junk at them. About >>25% of the utilities studied either core dumped or hung. > >This is not entirely fair. Many Unix tools are programmable, and can >be programmed to do stupid things (run forever or dump core). > >Of course, many are simply not able to handle `negative' characters. But isn't that the purpose of sanity checks? Shouldn't a good utility be able to know how to handle error conditions without freaking out? Conway Yee, N2JWQ yee@ming.mipg.upenn.edu (preferred) 231 S. Melville St. cy5@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (forwarded to above) Philadelphia, Pa 19139 yee@bnlx26.nsls.bnl.gov (rarely checked) (215) 386-1312
heimir@rhi.hi.is (Heimir Thor Sverrisson) (12/05/90)
In <75972@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes: >The December issue of Communications of the ACM contains an >interesting article, "An Empirical Study of the Reliability >of Unix Utilities". The authors describe tools they wrote which >would fire up various Unix utilities and send streams of random >8-bit junk at them. About 25% of the utilities studied This is confirmed by the failure of so many utilities to cope whith my 8-bit character data (Icelandic coded in ISO-8859/1, which is classified as a sort of 'random 8-bit junk' in some languages :-( -- Heimir Thor Sverrisson heimir@rhi.hi.is
src@scuzzy.in-berlin.de (Heiko Blume) (12/08/90)
heimir@rhi.hi.is (Heimir Thor Sverrisson) writes: >This is confirmed by the failure of so many utilities to cope whith my >8-bit character data (Icelandic coded in ISO-8859/1, which is classified >as a sort of 'random 8-bit junk' in some languages :-( i heard Sys V R4 tries to fix those. what unix did they test, actually?! -- Heiko Blume <-+-> src@scuzzy.in-berlin.de <-+-> (+49 30) 691 88 93 public source archive [HST V.42bis]: scuzzy Any ACU,f 38400 6919520 gin:--gin: nuucp sword: nuucp uucp scuzzy!/src/README /your/home