The ups and downs of strlcpy()
The ups and downs of strlcpy()
Posted Jul 28, 2012 10:43 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: The ups and downs of strlcpy() by nix
Parent article: The ups and downs of strlcpy()
The reason why my rant above sounds terribly specific is that this scenario actually happened to me. And kept happening to me, every week or so, for *years*, costing me perhaps time begging people to close other jobs down each time.
Needless to say the thought of rewriting (then X)Emacs's ferociously complex subprocess-handling infrastructure to use posix_spawn() never crossed my mind. (I tried vfork(), but that was clearly out of the question.)
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The ups and downs of strlcpy()
Posted Jul 31, 2012 1:30 UTC (Tue) by khc (guest, #45209) [Link]
nevermind that posix_spawn() uses fork/exec on linux anyway
The ups and downs of strlcpy()
Posted Jul 31, 2012 23:38 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
True, so the underlying overcommit problem isn't actually fixed by it, except inasmuch as it sometimes falls back to vfork() for you. It just makes your software much much uglier, and makes it work better on major platforms such as MMU-less embedded systems, the Hurd, and Cygwin.
The ups and downs of strlcpy()
Posted Aug 1, 2012 15:53 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]
Emacs already uses vfork if it's available. (Read the source.) Perhaps something else was wrong with that system.