Re: [bug-grep] search.c clean-up

[Elliott Hughes]

On Nov 24, 2004, at 03:29, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Elliott Hughes <address@hidden> wrote:
> ...
> > > The problem with the 4-parameter approach
> > >
> > >   static void
> > >   wrap_pattern (char *pattern, size_t *pattern_len,
> > >                 char const *prefix, char const *suffix)
> > >   {
> > >    ...
> > >   }
> > >
> > > is that it works fine when we don't have to free the PATTERN,
> > > but if anyone ever calls it with a malloc'd PATTERN, it will leak.
> >
> > return char*, and -- at the risk of more nitpickery -- expect the user
> > to call strlen if they need to know how long the pattern is?
>
> I disagree.
> A factorization change should avoid changing semantics.
> If you want to declare that patterns do not contain NUL bytes
> and adjust all of the corresponding interfaces, then belongs
> in a separate change.

i did think about that when i pasted in the comment from Pcompile, but 
didn't think it was significant because grep's already pretty uneven in 
that area. even if bash(1) used a real string type to allow '\0' in 
arguments, the char* argv[] mechanism doesn't let you transfer them, 
the length passed to the compile function by grep's main comes from 
strlen(3) if it's a bare argument, probably correctly handles patterns 
containing '\0' if they came from a file, but uses strcpy(3) if they 
came from '-e'.

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