Re: bash core dumps doing glob pattern on long string

[Chet Ramey]

On 10/9/22 4:07 AM, Phi Debian wrote:
> I was looking at a bug on ksh93 that is
> "core dumps doing glob pattern on long string" and it happen that bash
> suffer the same.
>
> $ [[ $(printf '%0100000d' 0) == +(0) ]]
>
> I see 3 way of fixing this
>
> 1)  [[ string == pattern ]] is for glob pattern, so string should be
> limited to PATH_MAX, so an upfront string length on string could prevent to
> call the glob pattern recursive functions, and then avoid the core dump.

This isn't a valid assumption -- the conditional command is not solely for
filename matching, as this example shows -- so not a good general solution.
In fact, PATH_MAX shouldn't be considered at all.

> 2) Since some may have abused the glob pattern with long string bigger then
> PATH_MAX but smaller than core dump, imposing a PATH_MAX limit may break
> some wrong scripts, so instead we could have a fix recursion deep level, as
> we do have for shell functions calling,  this hopefully should allow  wrong
> doing script with abused string length to continue to run, yet avoiding
> core dump when reaching the limit, i.e break the call path.
>
> 3) Implement a stack deep check in the recursion, when getting close to the
> end of stack break the function trail (like function too deep for recursive
> functions).

These are the same thing. You'd have to have a user-settable glob recursion
limit, which is something that few people would understand and even fewer
would set, since there's no good portable way to find how close you are to
exceeding your stack size resource limit without exceeding it, and a simple
string length check is not necessarily going to catch all cases. For
instance,

v=$(printf  '%0100000d' 0)
[[ $v == +($v) ]]

will run (slowly) to successful completion without exceeding any stack
limit.

So the problem becomes finding the appropriate recursion limit.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/