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From: chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: Reliability of Unix utilities: interesting article in CACM
Message-ID: <28282@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 90 13:54:58 GMT
References: <75972@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 13

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