Re: a recursion bug

[Greg Wooledge]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2012 at 10:01:43AM -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
> >On 9/28/12 9:54 AM, Yuxiang Cao wrote:
> >>test.sh: xmalloc: ../bash/unwind_prot.c:308: cannot allocate 172 bytes 
> >>(8359936 bytes allocated)

> Why shouldn't bash fail at the point it hits resource exhaustion and return
> an error condition -- like EAGAIN, ENOBUFS, ENOMEM... etc.

It did fail, and it gave that message quoted up above.  (Bash isn't a
system call, so it can't "return ENOMEM".  Those constants are only
meaningful in the context of a C program inspecting errno, not a
utility returning an exit status.)

> Bash should catch it's own resource allocation faults and not rely on
> something external to itself to clean up it's mess.

It did.

/* xmalloc.c -- safe versions of malloc and realloc */

/* Copyright (C) 1991-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

   This file is part of GNU Bash, the GNU Bourne Again SHell.

> Dumping core means bash lost control.

Where do you see a core dump?