Re: BUG #5418: psql exits after using tab-completion with error message

Thanks Tom,

I also reported it to Apple, but without this information, so I hope they get the sense that it might be important enough to look at, especially if there is already a fix known.

I also contacted William Kyngesbury, and he was sympathetic (but had never had the problem himself, but neither does he use the tab-completion), but would rather Apple fixed it because his GIS software suite is very based on using Apple OSX frameworks where they exist.

cheers

Ben

On 15/04/2010, at 12:13 , Tom Lane wrote:

> I wrote:
>> It's fairly easy to reproduce in the regression database:
>> type "\d ten<TAB>". I'm not sure what the triggering condition
>> is exactly, because some seemingly-similar cases don't fail,
>> for instance "\d test<TAB>" works as expected, ditto "\d t<TAB>".
>
> It turns out that the problem occurs when there are exactly 9 + 10*N
> possible completions, for any N>=0. There's an off-by-one logic bug
> in libedit that results in a memory stomp because it forgets to enlarge
> an array before storing a terminating null pointer in it.
>
> The upstream netbsd sources incorporated a fix some time ago:
> http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/lib/libedit/readline.c.diff?r1=1.82&r2=1.83&sortby=date&f=h
> with credit to Caleb Welton at Greenplum --- I wonder if he found it
> because of psql failing? Apple hasn't incorporated this fix as of
> OS X 10.6.3, however.
>
> What's slightly more distressing is that the same source file
> (readline.c) appears to have at least two other occurrences of the same
> broken array-enlargement coding pattern, which were *not* fixed.
>
> I've reported this to Apple but I'm not real sure where to file NetBSD
> bugs. Anybody want to yank the BSD guys' chain about the other errors?
>
> regards, tom lane

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Ben Madin
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