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I’m getting close to releasing version 3.3.11 of procps.  When it gets near that time, I generally browse again the Debian Bug Tracker for procps bugs. Bug number #733758 caught my eye.  With the free command if you used the s option before the c option, the s option failed, “seconds argument ‘N’ failed” where N was the number you typed in. The error should be for you trying to type letters for number of seconds. Seemed reasonably simple to test and simple to fix.

Take me to the code

The relevant code looks like this:

   case 's':
            flags |= FREE_REPEAT;
            args.repeat_interval = (1000000 * strtof(optarg, &endptr));
            if (errno || optarg == endptr || (endptr && *endptr))
                xerrx(EXIT_FAILURE, _("seconds argument `%s' failed"), optarg);

Seems pretty stock-standard sort of function. Use strtof() to convert the string into the float.

You need to check both errno AND optarg == endptr because:

• A valid but large float means errno = ERANGE
• A invalid float (e.g. “FOO”) means optarg == endptr

At first I thought the logic was wrong, but tracing through it was fine.  I then compiled free using the upstream git source, the program worked fine with s flag with no c flag. Doing a diff between the upstream HEAD and Debian’s 3.3.10 source showed nothing obvious.

I then shifted the upstream git to 3.3.10 too and re-compiled. The Debian source failed, the upstream parsed the s flag fine. I ran diff, no change. I ran md5sum, the hashes matched; what is going on here?

I’ll set when I want

The man page says in the case of under/overflow “ERANGE is stored in errno”. What this means is if there isn’t and under/overflow then errno is NOT set to 0, but its just not set at all. This is quite useful when you have a chain of functions and you just want to know something failed, but don’t care what.

Most of the time, you generally would have a “Have I failed?” test and then check errno for why. A typical example is socket calls where anything less than 0 means failure. You check the return value first and then errno. strtof() is one of those funny ones where most people check errno directly; its simpler than checking for +/- HUGE_VAL. You can see though that there are traps.

What’s the difference?

OK, so a simple errno=0 above the call fixes it, but why would the Debian source tree have this failure and the upstream not? Even with the same code? The difference is how they are compiled.

The upstream compiles free like this:

gcc -std=gnu99 -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -include ./config.h -I./include -DLOCALEDIR=\"/usr/local/share/locale\" -Iproc -g -O2 -MT free.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/free.Tpo -c -o free.o free.c
mv -f .deps/free.Tpo .deps/free.Po
/bin/bash ./libtool --tag=CC --mode=link gcc -std=gnu99 -Iproc -g -O2 ./proc/libprocps.la -o free free.o strutils.o fileutils.o -ldl
libtool: link: gcc -std=gnu99 -Iproc -g -O2 -o .libs/free free.o strutils.o fileutils.o ./proc/.libs/libprocps.so -ldl

 

While Debian has some hardening flags:

gcc -std=gnu99 -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -include ./config.h -I./include -DLOCALEDIR=\"/usr/share/locale\" -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Iproc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -MT free.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/free.Tpo -c -o free.o free.c
mv -f .deps/free.Tpo .deps/free.Po
/bin/bash ./libtool --tag=CC --mode=link gcc -std=gnu99 -Iproc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security ./proc/libprocps.la -Wl,-z,relro -o free free.o strutils.o fileutils.o -ldl
libtool: link: gcc -std=gnu99 -Iproc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wl,-z -Wl,relro -o .libs/free free.o strutils.o fileutils.o ./proc/.libs/libprocps.so -ldl

It’s not the compiling of free itself that is doing it, but the library. Most likely something that is called before the strtof() is setting errno which this code then falls into. In fact if you run the upstream free linked to the Debian procps library it fails.

Moral of the story is to set errno before the function is called if you are going to depend on it for checking if the function succeeded.