1.1.4: BUG in date.exe causes memory overflow if resulting datestring is empty

[Martin Oberhuber]

When you execute
   date +"%Z"
the date.exe program consumes all available memory until it 
terminates. The reason is that "%Z" results in an empty string
if the time zone is not set appropriately. 

Looking at the code in src/shellutils/src/date.c:341 , we see
the problem -- strftime(), which is used to format the date
string, returns 0 both when the date string is empty and when
it ran out of memory. In my opinion, this is quite sick behaviour
-- but well, we can't get around strftime() if we want to be
POSIXly correct.

So I think the only bulletproof solution is to make sure that
the date string CANNOT be empty after calling strftime().
The patch attached does just that:

  int in_length = strlen(formatstr);
  char *safe_format = (char *)malloc(in_length+2);
  *safe_format = 'X';   /* force non-empty result ! */
  strcpy(safe_format+1, formatstr);
  out_length = in_length;
  do {
    out_length += 200;
    out = (char *) xrealloc (out, out_length);
  }
  while (strftime (out, out_length, safe_format, tm) == 0);
  printf ("%s\n", out+1);
  free(out);
  free(safe_format);

I compiled and tested with gcc 2.95.2 -- date.exe becomes 1536 bytes
larger (most probably due to using strcpy() and strlen() ) but it's
safe now...

[/] diff -c src/shellutils/src/date.c.orig src/shellutils/src/date.c > date_patch.txt

Cheers,
Martin

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DI Martin Oberhuber                mailto:martin.oberhuber@windriver.com
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