Reliability of Unix utilities: interesting article in CACM

Chris Torek chris at mimsy.umd.edu
Wed Dec 5 00:54:58 AEST 1990


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.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at cs.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris



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