GNU bug report logs - #7877
sleep takes undocumented hex args

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Message #35 received at 7877 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
To: Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net>
Cc: 7877 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, bernhard.voelker <at> siemens-enterprise.com,
	jidanni <at> jidanni.org
Subject: Re: bug#7877: sleep takes undocumented hex args
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 07:51:42 -0700

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 01/21/2011 06:03 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> jidanni <at> jidanni.org wrote:
>> You see I was trying to make very special arguments to sleep so that I
>> can make sure to kill the one I want
>>     pkill -u jidanni -fx sleep\ 000022
>> It is not clear if that will still work.
> 
> With today's change using "sleep 000022" will
> still act just like "sleep 22".
> 
> I could not change that (and would not want to!)
> without breaking with years of tradition.
> 
>> Maybe the man/info page should
>> say a regexp that matches all valid args.
> 
> It already describes the format pretty well,
> mentioning "floating point" and the four suffixes.

Floating point literals include hex-floats, such as 0x1p1.  Does today's
added pre-filtering to reject 0x1 accidentally also reject hex-float
literals?  (It's a bit of a shame that when hex-floats were added that
strtod() was altered to accept hex-float literals but as a side effect
it also started accepting hexadecimal values without the p[+-]?[0-9]+
exponent suffix).

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake <at> redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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