NULL guards for string functions

[Karsten Fleischer]

> >According to C89/C99, "If an argument to a function has an 
> invalid value
> >(such as a value outside the domain of the function, or a 
> pointer outside
> >the address space of the program, or a null pointer, or a pointer to 
> >non-modifiable storage when the corresponding parameter is not 
> >const-qualified) or a type (after promotion) not expected by 
> a function
> >with variable number of arguments, the behavior is undefined."

That's what I suspected. I always fail to find that kind of sentence in
this huge C99 pdf file.

> >What this means is that the kernel should not be passing a 
> NULL pointer
> >to such functions and expecting them to work.  As an 
> example, the generic code for
> >glibc string functions does not check for NULL pointers either. 
> >
> >It does not make sense to slow down these basic functions to 
> handle a situation
> >that they are not defined to handle.  

Depends on the POV.
I prefer to handle such things as NULL pointers in low level routines.
But I don't want to start a discussion here.

> >You should bring this 
> up with the
> >cygwin developers as they can easily wrapper the functions 
> to do automatic
> >NULL checking if it is a prevalent problem or else they can 
> add checks
> >in specific pieces of code you have noted failures.

I was unsure if this was a cygwin or a newlib issue and I took the wrong
direction.
Sorry for the noise.

> Cygwin already has NULL-check guards on many functions.  Apparently we
> missed mount.  As Jeff mentioned, it makes no sense to slow 
> down string
> operations this way.

OK. I not aware of other cygwin calls that do not check for NULL
currently.
Of course, it was also not correct to call mount() with NULL args.

Karsten