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Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 21:52:55 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: scanf requirements not met?
Hi all,
In consideration of adding the 'm' modifier for scanf and looking at
how it's supposed to handle malloc failure, I believe the current
implementation may be getting some things wrong. Seeing that it
defined malloc failure as a "conversion error":
If there is insufficient memory to allocate a buffer, the function
shall set errno to [ENOMEM] and a conversion error shall result.
I noticed that this was not either of the "failures" defined for
scanf: input or matching. The text "conversion error" does not occur
elsewhere, but the ERRORS section does specify:
If any error occurs, EOF shall be returned, and errno shall be set
to indicate the error.
The current behavior in musl is to treat EILSEQ and IO errors from the
underlying stdio layer as input failures, but in light of the above,
this seems wrong/non-conforming. It looks to me like, even if a number
of conversions have already taken place successfully, scanf is
required to return EOF anyway if an error is encountered later. This
also makes the following text make more sense:
If the function returns EOF, any memory successfully allocated for
parameters using assignment-allocation character 'm' by this call
shall be freed before the function returns.
I previously thought the only way the function could return EOF was
when no successful conversions had taken place, in which case there
would be nothing to free. But if EOF can happen even after successful
conversions, then it makes sense. (And it's also a pain to implement.)
Does this all sound right? I'll probably wait until after the release
to go working on it, and add 'm' at the same time, since scanf is ugly
and fragile and not something I want to break pending a release.
Rich
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