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This is because OSX uses a feature-limited (and apparently completely broken given this report...) BSD-derived userspace instead of the GNU software used with L

by devit 11y ago

This is because OSX uses a feature-limited (and apparently completely broken given this report...) BSD-derived userspace instead of the GNU software used with Linux, which are usually specifically designed to not have fixed limits of any kind.

daenney 11y ago
That's because, license wise, they can't include GPL 3 licensed code, aka the GNU user space. Also, this bug does not prove that the whole user space is completely broken. Many people use it daily without ever hitting these bugs. If you go looking for issues, you'll find them, just as you'll find them on Linux but in different places. Not to say this doesn't suck and we shouldn't fix them, but it's hardly proof of anything.
- devit 11y ago
  Where "can't" means "they don't want to because they want to reserve themselves the ability to screw their users by shipping devices with OSX or derivatives installed where the user cannot change the software, which the GPLv3 is specifically designed to prevent". Considering handling paths is one of the most fundamental functions of the Unix tools and C library, having buffer overflows there is quite damning.
  - daenney 11y ago
    Regardless of your personal dislike of the vendor, there have been plenty of buffer overflows and other bugs in coreutils/fileutils. The Mac/BSD user space is by no means an exception.
    - lmm 11y ago
      Which is a real indictment of C, when programs this simple have bugs this severe.
misterdata 11y ago
So I assume this means the other BSDs (e.g. FreeBSD) exhibit the same bug?
- __s 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10443276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10443276