James Carlson wrote: > Darren J Moffat writes: > >> The behavior of HP-UX and AIX is unknown to the author of this case, >> and since they are closed source there is no easy we to determine what >> their implementation does. >> > > AIX prints an empty string, as though "" had been passed in. Our > HP-UX box has locked up, or I'd give you that one as well. :-/ > > If memory serves, I seem to remember at least one platform (can't recall which) where passing a NULL pointer as a string to printf actually caused printf to print the string "<NULL>".
I don't remember which platform that was, though, Scince it's not AIX or (from another post) HP-UX, then the only other ones I worked on were IRIX and Ultrix...oh and a little OSF/1. -Kyle >> This isn't a scalable way to approach the problem and hurts the >> reputation of Solaris and OpenSolaris releases. It also hinders the >> > > The sad thing here is that it's really the bug-ridden application code > that mishandles NULL pointers that's of poor quality, so it's not > OpenSolaris's reputation that should be at stake. > > So, with this one under our belts, should we also fix up the str*(3C) > family of functions so that they quietly ignore NULL pointers as well? > An application that's incautious with NULL can't possibly just make > that mistake with printf alone, can it? > > Is NULL the only bad pointer worth caring about? What sorts of bad > pointer checks need to be made so that malfunctioning applications can > continue running without dropping core? How deep does the rabbit hole > go? > >
