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Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!grkermit!masscomp!clyde!floyd!vax135!ukc!edcaad!edee!edai!ok
From: ok@edai.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.bugs.uucp
Subject: News 2.10 /usr/lib/news/recmail crashes
Message-ID: <3949@edai.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 21-Jan-84 16:10:31 EST
Article-I.D.: edai.3949
Posted: Sat Jan 21 16:10:31 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Jan-84 04:38:06 EST
Organization: Art.Intelligence,Edin.Univ.
Lines: 39


     Every time I (try to) use the 'r'eply option of readnews, I  arrive
safely  back  at  readnews  prompt  level  having  correctly  produced a
/tmp/pn????? file, and a few seconds later get a message on  the  screen
"sh:  bus  error,  core  dumped"  or something like that.  I finally got
annoyed enough to track the problem down.

     recmail.c has a section which looks roughly like this:

	FILE *fd;
	char *tmpf;
	char linebuf[1024];
	...
	tmpf = mktemp("/tmp/rmXXXXXX");
	fd = fopen(tmpf, "w");

	while (fgets(linebuf, sizeof linebuf, stdin) != NULL) {
		fputs(linebuf, fd);
		...

     The immediate cause of the problem is the fputs call: fd  is  NULL!
I  am  not all that charmed by recmail's failure to check that the fopen
call worked.  I am totally bewildered by the fact that  fopen  sometimes
returns  NULL  here.  The call to mktemp has in fact come up with a file
name which I can create.  I have tried to make this program fail on  its
own,  and I can't. The only thing I can think of is *maybe* it is called
from some process which has tied up all the channels available and isn't
closing them when it forks?

     In any case, does anyone know how  to  fix  this  problem?   (We're
running 4.1bsd in case it matters.)

     There's another problem with this version of recmail: it never ever
removes the /tmp/rm?????? file it creates.  The only thing that stops it
clogging up /tmp is that it never succeeds in creating the file.  Or  is
there a hack for that in some other program in the news suite?  Just for
completing ones losses, the /tmp/pn????? file IS removed, so that if you
want to mail the article by hand, you have to re-enter it.  Nice one!