On 2025-06-24 18:31, Jim Meyering wrote:
> That goes way back. I think od.c
> was the second stand-alone program I contributed to coreutils (first
> was tr). The earliest email I still have that mentions it is from
> 1997-01 prior to textutils-1.22, but that was just a ChangeLog entry
> about adapting to a changed strtod API.

I have a soft spot for 'od' as I remember using it in Unix in the 1970s. 
So I looked for nearby bugs and found a few, mostly integer overflows. I 
installed the attached patches to refactor the source and to fix the 
bugs I found.

You might be amused by patch 0007, which fixes a POSIX conformance bug 
introduced in January 1995, in what is now Git commit 
851162a0da41f2b6b08a8c1ed045086db9a443a0. Evidently this POSIX-required 
feature is not often used! The NEWS item in the fix says "[bug 
introduced on 1995-01-25]" instead of the usual "[bug introduced in 
coreutils-N]" comment because I don't know how to relate that commit to 
a version number (would it be textutils? probably doesn't matter).

You might also be amused (or appalled) by patch 0007's hacky fix. I 
couldn't bestir myself to write a cleaner fix. The hacky fix doesn't 
require memory allocation so in some sense it's better than a cleaner 
one would be.