Termcap issue in cygwin

[Eduardo Chappa <chappa at math dot washington dot edu>]

Hello,

 This message has two parts, the long story, and the short story. First
the short story.

   As far as I understand, the function tgetent, has two parameters, which
are documented in the manual for termcap(3) and tgetent, the first one is
of type (char *). According to the manual of the unix system I am using
the length of this string is supposed to be 1024. I have found that the
entries for the linux and cygwin terminal are over 1024 characters long,
which causes this function to corrupt the stack and the program dump core.
A classical buffer overflow bug. I believe this is an issue with the
termcap database, which I believe should be shortened to satisfy the 1024
characters length requirement in (it seems) most (if not all) Unix
systems.

  Now the long story (which puts the short story in context). My real goal
was to compile Pine for cygwin, which I did, and you are welcome to give
it a try by downloading it from my web page (address below). The problem
that I had was that every time that I started Pine in the cygwin terminal,
it would dump core, due to the problem described above. Pine needed to be
executed under rxvt, for example, in order to not to make it dump core.
Although I believed for some time that rxvt was a requirement in order to
execute Pine, now I realize that it is not, but my request instead is to
make the work around of giving more space to the first argument of tgetent
disappear.

 Is there any chance that both the linux and the cygwin entries will be
shortened to less than 1024 characters?, or should I just have to accept
this as a given?

  Thank you!

-- 
Eduardo
http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/





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