File and directory primitives are severely broken

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Tue Apr 25 01:27:23 UTC 2006


On 24-Apr-06, at 3:06 PM, Ian Piumarta wrote:

> Many of the file primitives allocate 1000-byte buffers for path  
> names and pass their address to functions defined in support code,  
> without passing their length or in any way trying to agree with  
> support code about what the maximum length of a path name should be.

Yup, very tacky. RISC OS and win32 don't actually use any of this  
code (Cross/plugins/filePlugin/sqFilePluginBasicPrims.c) though and  
so aren't affected in quite the same manner.

> Directory primitives are worse: in one place a 256-byte buffer is  
> allocated on the stack and expected to be sufficient for any  
> directory entry.
The implementation of primitiveDirectoryLookup in FilePlugin is  
certainly in error and it really should pass in the size of that  
entryName buffer. Which it could trivially do simply by setting the  
value of entryNameSize before calling dir_Lookup() without having to  
rely on limits.h. Should Slang code rely on a name defined in a .h  
file? Can't say I particularly care much either way.

>
> Here's the portable way to fix this without changing any of the APIs.
>
> I suggest everyone who maintains a platform check that they do  
> indeed have <limits.h> (its availability is mandated by ANSI C) and  
> once nobody reports it missing that this header file be included at  
> the beginning of sq.h.

Sounds workable

>   All occurrences of
>
> 	char buf[1000];
> or
> 	char entryName[256];
>
> that allocate space for path names in the file and directory prims  
> should then be changed to read
>
> 	char buf[PATH_MAX];
>
> before one of these ticking time bombs explodes in someone's face.

Feel free to edit and commit.
>
> FWIW: The Unix VM uses PATH_MAX religiously when checking for over- 
> length, or allocating space for, path names.  (This is the correct  
> thing to do.)  On OS X PATH_MAX is 1024; on Linux it's 4096.
So does RISC OS and I'm pretty sure so does win32 (uncertainty only  
because I start defocussing if I look at windwos API code), so no  
need to worry there.

I can change the VMM method for primitiveDirectoryLookup to
a) use PATH_MAX
b) set the entryNameSize just in case

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
"How many Slavers does it take to change a lightbulb?" "Dunno. How  
susceptible are lightbulbs to telepathy?"





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