Re: Integer Overflow in braces

[Greg Wooledge]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 07:54:48AM -0500, Dan Douglas wrote:
> IMHO the issue of whether the integer is allowed to overflow is separate from 
> the question of whether the resulting expansion is "too big". Code that does 
> an `eval "blah{0..$n}"` is reasonably common and not necessarily stupid. 

Yes, that's fine.  But I don't actually understand what kind of overflow
Pasha K was actually trying to test for.  He/she mentioned "nelem", which
only appears in two places in the bash source code: once in indexed
arrays, and once in associative arrays.  But there were no arrays in
the script being executed.

{0..9999999999999999} should produce an error because it runs out of
memory.  So I would expect to see a malloc failure, or something similar.
If Pasha is saying that an integer overflow occurs before the malloc
failure, then that may or may not be interesting to Chet.  If it crashes
bash, then it's not interesting to me, because the inevitable malloc
failure would have crashed it if the overflow didn't.  It only becomes
interesting to me if the integer overflow causes some weird behavior to
happen BEFORE bash crashes.