gets(3) nonsense

[Guy Harris]

>\"Intended" in what sense?  Somebody put it in there so that people would
>\deliberately write programs using it, and thus would write programs that
>\could be made to fail by sending them lines longer than they expect? 
>
>Hey people! I just found out somebody put a nasty little program in /bin!
>It's called `rm'. If you type `rm *', all your files will disappear!

You've totally missed the point.

Somebody might want all the files in a given directory to disappear.  I
have difficulty imagining anybody who *wants* to write a program that
blows up when you feed too-long lines at it.

>\Or somebody put it in there so that you could avoid the nasty run-time
>\overhead of checking string bounds?
>
>Of course!

"Of course somebody put it in so you can avoide string bounds checking?"
I dispute this.  Got any references handy to prove your assertion?

>If you want security, use fgets()!

I want security.  I want everyone *else* to want security.  I don't want
programs that die randomly if they get handed lines that are too long. 
Programs like that are rude.