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IIRC, "most UNIX variants" didn't have an undump command. It primarily came with a few huge applications that played these type of games. The two worst offend
by jlv2 10y ago
IIRC, "most UNIX variants" didn't have an undump command. It primarily came with a few huge applications that played these type of games. The two worst offenders that I remember were in fact GNU Emacs and TeX! A few other programs that I dealt with (porting to a new platform) which depended upon a similar hack were Sendmail and Franz Lisp.
The Sendmail "WIZ" SMTP bug was in fact caused by it's use of reloading the frozen configuration file (the pointer to the password was saved in the data section, not the BSS region that was reloaded from the frozen config, so that if you used a frozen config you effectively had an empty password).
- btilly 10y agoMy impression comes from the comments in the undump link that I provided. To your list of other programs you can add Perl. It comes with a dump command to take a core dump that can be turned into an executable. I never used it as anything other than a joke, but I do know several people who independently used that feature in production back in the 1990s.