null parameters to functions

[bowman]

From: "Earnie Boyd" <earnie_boyd@yahoo.com>
>
> IIRC, it's not an error in Linux land or most *nixes for that matter.
> It OS dependent on how addressing a null pointer is handled.  Looking at
> the man page from HPUX 11 it says that null pointer values are treated
> as empty strings.

AIX4 ignores NULL, but most of the Linux platforms will dump core on an
attempt to access NULL. We've been developing on Linux for some time, and
catch errors that our AIX4 legacy code calmly ignored.

I think the behavior can be configured, but the default is to die for any
Linux box I've worked on.