Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!xanth!nic.MR.NET!srcsip!pavo!miller
From: miller@pavo.SRC.Honeywell.COM (Steven M. Miller)
Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug
Subject: ar bug
Message-ID: <21740@srcsip.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 89 18:53:14 GMT
Sender: news@src.honeywell.COM
Reply-To: miller@srcsip.UUCP ()
Organization: Honeywell Systems & Research Center, MPLS, MN
Lines: 12


ar.c provided with the binutils distribution has some problems with 
dereferencing null pointers.

The strcmp at line 1523 in ar.c compares tail->info.name with "__.SYMDEF"
Unfortunately tail->info.name can apparently be a null pointer which
causes ar to fail on Suns and probably a lot of other machines.
I hacked in a fix to check for a null pointer at that point in the file and
ar appears to work now, but the maintainer of this should probably check for
other cases where this can happen.

-Steve