The fixargs() function is invoked when ksh needs to run a script
without a #!/hashbang/path. Instead of letting the kernel invoke a
shell, ksh exfile()s the script itself from sh_main(). In the
forked child, it calls fixargs() to set the argument list in the
environment to the args of the new script, so that 'ps' and
/proc/PID/cmdline show the expected output.
But fixargs() is broken because, on systems other than HP-UX (on
which ksh uses pstat(2)), ksh simply inserts a terminating zero.
The arguments list is not a zero-terminated C string. Unix systems
expect the entire arguments buffer to be zeroed out, otherwise 'ps'
and /proc/*/cmdline will have fragments of previous command lines
in the output.
The Red Hat patch for this bug is:
642af4d6/f/ksh-20120801-argvfix.patch
However, that fix is incomplete because 'command_len' was also
hardcoded to be limited to 64 characters (!), which still gave
invalid 'ps' output if the erased command line was longer.
src/cmd/ksh93/sh/main.c: fixargs():
- Remove CMD_LENGTH macro which was defined as 64.
- Remove code that limited the erasure of the arguments buffer to
CMD_LENGTH characters. That code also had quite a dodgy strdup()
call -- it copies arguments to the heap, but they are never freed
(or even used), so it's a memory leak. Also, none of this is
ever done if the length is calculated using pstat(2) on HP-UX,
which is a clear indication that it's unnecessary.
(I think this code block must have been some experiment they
forgot to remove. One reason why I think so is that a 64 byte
arguments limit never made sense, even in the 1980s when they
wrote ksh on 80-column CRT displays. Another indication of this
is that fixing it didn't require adding anything; the code to do
the right thing was already there, it was just being overridden.)
- Zero out the full arguments length as in the Red Hat patch.
src/cmd/ksh93/tests/basic.sh:
- Add test. It's sort of involved because 'ps' is one of the least
portable commands in practice, in spite of standardisation.
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