Re: [Nano-devel] solving a history bug in nano [patch]

[Tito]

On 05/30/2016 05:51 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> On Mon, 30 May 2016 09:20:24 +0200
> Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > try instead of (size_t)-1 the values 100, 255, 32000, 65535. If
> > none of those segfault, then at least we have a workaround: nobody
> > is going to type sixty-five thousand characters to search for.
>
> No one will ever need more than 640k of memory!
>
> The value might be converted to a signed int somewhere inside find_history. 
> Perhaps use the largest value possible that can never be negative?
>
> #define SIZE_T_HALF_MAX ((~(size_t)0)>>1)

Hi,
what I would do is (based on a very superficial look at the code):

1) when reading in search history from a history file set it to
   the length of the longest string and not more than  SIZE_T_HALF_MAX

2) when search strings are typed in by the user increase the size
   accordingly if the string is longer than the longest string stored
   up to SIZE_T_HALF_MAX

this would avoid in most use cases to waste memory as search strings in
my experience are rather short.

Ciao,
Tito