Reliability of Unix utilities: interesting article in CACM

[Conway Yee]

In article <28282 at mimsy.umd.edu> chris at mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:
>In article <75972 at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
>(Steve Hayman) writes:
>>... The authors describe tools they wrote which would fire up various
>>Unix utilities and send streams of random 8-bit junk at them.   About
>>25% of the utilities studied either core dumped or hung.
>
>This is not entirely fair.  Many Unix tools are programmable, and can
>be programmed to do stupid things (run forever or dump core).
>
>Of course, many are simply not able to handle `negative' characters.

But isn't that the purpose of sanity checks?  Shouldn't a good utility
be able to know how to handle error conditions without freaking out?

					Conway Yee, N2JWQ
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