On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Jeffrey Horner <jeffrey.hor...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > I think I've found a bug in the C function do_grep located in > src/main/grep.c. It seems to affect both the latest revisions of > R-2-13-branch and trunk when compiling R without optimizations and > with it's own version of pcre located in src/extra, at least on ubuntu > 10.04. > > According to the pcre_exec API (I presume the later versions), the > ovecsize argument must be a multiple of 3 , and the ovector argument > must point to a location that can hold at least ovecsize integers. All > the pcre_exec calls made by do_grep, save one, honors this. That one > call seems to overwrite areas of the stack it shouldn't. Here's the > smallest example I found that tickles the bug: > >> grep("[^[:blank][:cntrl]]","\\n",perl=TRUE) > Error in grep("[^[:blank][:cntrl]]", "\\n", perl = TRUE) : > negative length vectors are not allowed
As many of you know, that regex is invalid. It's just the one I happened upon that tickled the bug. It actually came from an error that occurred when building R itself. Here's a snippet of my make log: make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/hornerj/R-sources/branches/R-2-13-branch/po' you should 'make docs' now ... make[1]: Entering directory `/home/hornerj/R-sources/branches/R-2-13-branch/doc' Error in grep("[^[:blank:][:cntrl:]]", unlist(Rd[sections == "TEXT"]), : negative length vectors are not allowed Calls: saveRDS -> <Anonymous> -> prepare2_Rd -> grep Execution halted make[1]: *** [NEWS.rds] Error 1 > > As described above, this error occurs on ubuntu 10.04 when R is > compiled without optimizations ( I typically use CFLAGS="-ggdb" > CXXFLAGS="-ggdb" FFLAGS="-ggdb" ./configure --enable-R-shlib), and the > pcre_exec call executed from do_get overwrites the integer nmatches > and sets it to -1. This has the effect of making do_grep try and > allocate a results vector of length -1, which of course causes the > error message above. > > I'd be interested to know if this bug happens on other platforms. > > Below is my simple fix for R-2-13-branch (a similar fix works for > trunk as well). > > Jeff > > $ svn diff main/grep.c > Index: main/grep.c > =================================================================== > --- main/grep.c (revision 57110) > +++ main/grep.c (working copy) > @@ -723,7 +723,7 @@ > { > SEXP pat, text, ind, ans; > regex_t reg; > - int i, j, n, nmatches = 0, ov, rc; > + int i, j, n, nmatches = 0, ov[3], rc; > int igcase_opt, value_opt, perl_opt, fixed_opt, useBytes, invert; > const char *spat = NULL; > pcre *re_pcre = NULL /* -Wall */; > @@ -882,7 +882,7 @@ > if (fixed_opt) > LOGICAL(ind)[i] = fgrep_one(spat, s, useBytes, use_UTF8, NULL) > >= 0; > else if (perl_opt) { > - if (pcre_exec(re_pcre, re_pe, s, strlen(s), 0, 0, &ov, 0) >= > 0) > + if (pcre_exec(re_pcre, re_pe, s, strlen(s), 0, 0, ov, 3) >= 0) > INTEGER(ind)[i] = 1; > } else { > if (!use_WC) > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel