>While we are into this discussion, what about implementing a kind of
>purify in NetBSD ?
>
>This would trap overflows in gets() as well as many other obscure
>bugs in memory management...
>
>[ For those who don't know purify, it's a commercial product that allows
>a run-time debugging of memory allocation problems (writing past an
>malloc'ed block or to a free'd block, freeing a block twice, reading
>uninizialized memory...) by trapping all malloc calls and all memory
>references at run time. ]
>
>
>					Matthieu

Overflow checking is easy to archieve if there is hardware help, but
it is difficult and expensive to implement it in software.    For
example, if overflow occurred within a page-frame, hardware generally,
can't help.   A software solution might be too expensive, if it works
at all (who checks for the checker?).
  
The simplier solution might be add the second argument to gets():
     char *gets (char *buffer, int size)

Shao Wu


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