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Re: [BUG] Bash segfaults on an infinitely recursive funcion (resend)


From: Dan Douglas
Subject: Re: [BUG] Bash segfaults on an infinitely recursive funcion (resend)
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2017 14:29:43 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.3.0

On 09/25/2017 01:38 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 09/24/2017 12:53 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> 
>>
>> I see. Well, the general wisdom is that a program should not ever segfault, 
>> but
>> instead gracefully handle the error and exit.
> 
> This is possible by installing a SIGSEGV handler that is able to
> gracefully exit the program when stack overflow is detected (although
> such a handler is EXTREMELY limited in what it is able to safely do); in
> fact, the GNU libsigsegv library helps in this task, and is used by some
> other applications (such as GNU m4 and GNU awk) that also can cause
> infinite recursion on poor user input. However, Chet is not obligated to
> use it (even though the idea has been mentioned on the list before).
> 
>> Perhaps implement a maximal
>> recursion depth like zsh does.
> 
> Bash does, in the form of FUNCNEST, but you have to opt into it, as
> otherwise it would be an arbitrary limit, and arbitrary limits go
> against the GNU coding standards.
> 
> By the way, it is in general IMPOSSIBLE to write bash so that it can
> handle ALL possible bad user scripts and still remain responsive to
> further input.  Note that in my description of handling SIGSEGV above
> that I mention that it is only safe to gracefully turn what would
> otherwise be the default core dump into a useful error message - but
> bash STILL has to exit at that point, because you cannot guarantee what
> other resources (including malloc locks) might still be on the stack,
> where a longjmp back out to the main parsing loop may cause future
> deadlock if you do anything unsafe.  If you think you can make bash
> gracefully handle ALL possible bad inputs WITHOUT exiting or going into
> an infloop itself, then you are claiming that you have solved the
> Halting Problem, which any good computer scientist already knows has
> been proven to be undecidable.
> 

If a shell (that's interpreted) crashes due to overflowing its process's
actual call stack it can only be because the shell's "call_function"
function (or its callees) call call_function, and call_function is not
itself tail-recursive so the C compiler can't eliminate it. It should
be perfectly possible to implement that without any recursion so the
shell's stack representation (presumably on the heap) can grow without
affecting the real stack for EVERY call to any trivial shell function. I
don't know what kind of major surgery would be required on bash to fix
that. libsigsegv would only be a band-aid.

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