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From: ji@close.cs.columbia.edu (John Ioannidis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: BUG: incorrect argument to gethostname(2) panics kernel
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.223852.10037@cs.columbia.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 90 22:38:52 GMT
Sender: ji@close.cs.columbia.edu (John "Heldenprogrammer" Ioannidis)
Reply-To: ji@close.cs.columbia.edu (John "Heldenprogrammer" Ioannidis)
Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 23


The gethostname(2) system call has the following syntax:

	int gethostname(name, length)
	char *name;
	int length;

Older implementations needed the length argument to be an int *, and
the length paramenter was a value-result parameter. I compiled such a
program, and tried running it on my HP-9000/350 running HP-UX 7.0, and
instead of getting a segmentation violation (the length being in the
billions, since it was an address in the stack), the kernel crashed
with a bus error. 

If anyone at HP is reading this, please consider fixing it in some future
release.

/ji

In-Real-Life: John "Heldenprogrammer" Ioannidis
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