UB status of snprintf on invalid ptr+size combination?

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On 2023-03-19 19:07, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2023-03-19 10:45:59 -0400, manfred via Libc-alpha wrote:
>> All of that said, back to the OP case I would not pass INT_MAX to snprintf.
>> If I have a situation wherein I know that the buffer is large enough, but I
>> don't know its exact size, I'd use sprintf and be done with it. (I'm sure
>> that the actual code is more elaborate than this, but still)
> 
> In simple code, probably. But in actual code, it may be more natural
> to use snprintf. Something like that:
> 
>    snprintf(buf, checked ? SIZE_MAX : n, "%s", s);
> 
> The function may not know the buffer size if `checked` is true,
> so that it uses a known bound. Thanks to common code factorized,
> this is more readable than
> 
>    if (checked)
>      sprintf (buf, "%s", s);
>    else
>      snprintf(buf, n, "%s", s);
> 
> in particular in the cases where the format string is complex.

If your application requires such patterns then it really needs an 
additional layer of abstraction or maybe a rethink on the pattern 
itself.  This is not something the C runtime should try to solve.

I think on the glibc front it makes sense from a security perspective to 
interpret this through POSIX than the C standard.  Even if the C 
standard is clarified to be contrary to POSIX and explicitly state that 
n is not the size of the buffer (which would be a terrible mistake IMO), 
I'd lean towards violating the C standard and conforming to POSIX instead.

Sid