Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!unixhub!saab.stanford.edu!morrow.stanford.edu!embezzle.stanford.edu!castor From: castor@embezzle.stanford.edu (Castor Fu) Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix Subject: calendar, egrep, and unmonitored reads Message-ID: Date: 28 Sep 90 22:49:11 GMT Sender: news@morrow.stanford.edu (UNIX News Service) Distribution: comp Organization: Data Center, Stanford University, California, USA Lines: 14 I discovered today, (maybe you did to. . . . ) that the stock egrep on ultrix 3.1 has a small (256??) limit on it's pattern buffer. Normally this is not a huge problem, but today, calendar generated 388 characters of patterns and egrep managed to stomp on itself in a way which caused it to use memory until it exhausted itself. Hopefully no one has egrep running in some setuid shellscript where the pattern file is mungable. . . . . I guess I will modify calendar to use GNU egrep. . . . castor fu castor@fizzle.stanford.edu