Re: url's in --help output

[Eric Blake]

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According to Simon Josefsson on 2/2/2009 5:16 AM:
>> In m4, I was using xprintf instead of printf.  Is it worth the extra
>> security here?  printf can fail for reasons like ENOMEM which do not set
>> the ferror flag and thus are not caught by the close_stdout atexit module,
>> so a robust program should be checking for failures.
> 
> Does this problem occur in practice on any modern platform?

Yes - Jim noticed real problems on a GNU/Linux system when implementing
printf(1), where the printf(3) failed due to malloc failure without
printing any output, but also without setting the stream error indicator,
such that printf(1) exited with status 0.  Which is why he implemented
xprintf in the first place.  On the other hand, the failure scenario is
more likely to occur when using formats that produce lots of output (large
precisions), or convert floating point to decimal, neither of which should
be the case for these statements.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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