Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cunixf.cc.columbia.edu!cunixa.cc.columbia.edu!cy5
From: cy5@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Conway Yee)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: Reliability of Unix utilities: interesting article in CACM
Message-ID: <1990Dec4.193737.28012@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 90 19:37:37 GMT
References: <75972@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <28282@mimsy.umd.edu>
Sender: news@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (The Daily News)
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 19

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