[6444] in Athena Bugs
Strange fingerd bugs while reading .plan file
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Nov 21 21:22:02 1990
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: kubitron@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 90 21:21:39 EST
From: "Manavendra K. Thakur" <thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu>
PROBLEM:
In certain situations, certain letters in a user's .plan file
are not printed.
REPEAT BY:
Put the following (everything in between the double-dashed
lines below) in your .plan file:
========
Freeze.
Mail.
=======
I.e., there must be a newline, followed by "Freeze.", a newline, and
then "Mail." and then another newline.
If anyone then fingers this user, the response back will be:
=======
AlefNull% f thakur
.
.
.
Plan:
Freeze.
ail.Alefnull%
Note how the 'M' in 'Mail' and the final newline got swallowed.
Now, here's an interesting counter example: If the leading newline is
deleted, then no characters are dropped.
I.e., if the .plan file looks like
AlefNull% od -a .plan
0000000 F r e e z e . nl M a i l . nl
0000016
AlefNull%
then all the characters get printed. Works like a charm in this case!
REPEAT BY (II):
Similarly, you'll find weird things happening if your .plan file looks
like this:
AlefNull% od -a .plan.bug
0000000 nl sp sp sp sp sp sp sp sp sp sp I nl
0000015
In this case, the 'I' will not get printed at all!
CAUSE:
I don't know what's causing this, but printing the .plan file
with cat shows all the right characters are there. So the problem
must be arising within the finger program or the finger daemon.
Note that the problem above occurs on an RT running the latest
release (7.1H). I don't know if the problem happens on the VAX
machines.
FIX:
Beats me. I don't have access to Athena source, so I couldn't
step through finger/fingerd with a debugger. But it doesn't sound
like it should be too big of a deal to fix. Of course, the problem
itself is a pretty minor one, so it may not be worth your time to
track it down! :-)
Hope this helps.
Manavendra Thakur
