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From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Garbage in argv[] w/Lattice C
Message-ID: <329@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 29-Nov-86 17:18:12 EST
Article-I.D.: neoucom.329
Posted: Sat Nov 29 17:18:12 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Nov-86 21:10:42 EST
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 41
Keywords: Annoyance

Hi people,

	I just ran into a minor annoyance with the Lattice C
compiler that we have here at work.  If memory stikes me right,
it's version 3.02.

I discovered that when I read argv[n][n] that the string isn't
always terminated with a \0 as you'd expect.  This seems to happen
mostly (if not only) when the string contains ascii characters that
are digits.

Strings in argv[] that have digits in them seem to be terinated
with 0xff ( <DEL> ) some of the time, other times \0 as you'd
expect.

I never noticed the effect until one of our poeple started using
file names containing digits (which we read from argv[]), and it
took a while before we hit one.

What I was doing was parsing the string until I hit the zero at the
end, so I was getting an extra character or two of junk tacked on
to the end of what appeared to be the legitimate file name.

For the momenet. I'm going to assume that in this specialized case
that either 0x00 or 0xff can be a valid string terminator.  Is
there a better way to do it?

If what I described is a real bug rather than my imagination, is it
an artifact of something that CLI does while scanning the command
line before passing off to my program, or is LCstartup goofing it
up?

My apologies if this discussion went around before, but I didn't
notice it.
  --Bill

Bill Mayhew
Divsion of Basic Medical Sciences
Northeastern Ohio Universities' College of Medicine
Rootstown, OH  44272  USA    phone: 216-325-2511
(...!cbatt!neoucom!wtm would be a good path)