[1733] in Athena Bugs
csh aliases
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Carr)
Fri Feb 3 11:42:32 1989
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 89 10:57:11 EST
From: John Carr <jfc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
It has been noted in 4bsd bugs that the name of an alias is printed using
printf() when a user types in "alias" alone. This causes unpredictable
results when the alias name contains a '%' character (as printf() then
looks for further arguments to print, which have not been supplied). The
first time I tested this on an RT, it crashed the machine ("panic: kernel
trap"). I think this is an excessive response to a program bug.
Footnote: this is the third time in the last few weeks that an RT has crashed
with this error while I was logging out [I did the above experiment in my
login shell, so after it crashed {and core dumped, I found later} I would
have been logged out]. Therefore I can't be sure if the machine crashed
because of the bad printf() or because of the same bug that hit me the other
two times.
--John Carr
