Bug 5131

Summary: getcwd(NULL,1024) does not behave as per man page
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: cosmo
Component: glibcAssignee: Cristian Gafton <gafton>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 1999-10-06 17:12:17 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description cosmo 1999-09-14 16:40:16 UTC 
/*
When called with a NULL buffer and a positive size argument
the man page states that a buffer of size bytes is
allocated.
This does not apear true as appending to the end of the
buffer causes a SEGV when later malloc/free calls are made:
*/

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  char *cwd;
  char *chunk;
  size_t buffsize = 1024;
  size_t bigbuffsize = 10000;

  if ((cwd = getcwd(NULL, buffsize)) == NULL)
  {
    printf ("getcwd (NULL, %d) == NULL\n");
    exit (1);
  }
  else
    printf ("cwd: %s\n", cwd);

  strcat (cwd, ":This is a bogus string");

  printf ("Now my buffer contains \"%s\"[%d]\n",
          cwd, strlen(cwd));

  if ((chunk = malloc (10000)) == NULL)
  {
    printf ("malloc(%d) failure!\n", bigbuffsize);
  }
  else
  {
    printf ("Grabbed %d bytes\n", bigbuffsize);
    free (chunk);
  }

  if (cwd)
    free (cwd);

  return (0);
}
Comment 1 Cristian Gafton 1999-10-06 17:12:59 UTC 
This function behaves as defined by the Single Unix Specification
version 2. We will have to fix the man page for it, but the behavior
is according to the specs:

The getcwd() function places an absolute pathname of the current
working directory in the array
pointed to by buf, and returns buf. The size argument is the size in
bytes of the character array
pointed to by the buf argument. If buf is a null pointer, the
behaviour of getcwd() is undefined.