RE: buffer overflow on zsh-3.1.9

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Jonel Rienton wrote:

> doesn't this constitute for a malicious user to bring down your system
> in a multi environment box?

If you have to defend your box against the users that have shell access,
you're already in much deeper trouble than anything a change to zsh would
help you with.

> This email is sent by qmail-1.03 on a
> FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE box

Incidentally, on my desktop linux box at work (a 200MHz Pentium II with
128Mb RAM, getting rather old now) I have to hit Alt-9 seven times to even
slow the shell down noticeably when I hit the next key, and it still
succeeded in inserting 'a' 9999999 times.

I don't recall for certain, but I believe FreeBSD may be one of the
platforms that has pathologically bad realloc() behavior when repeatedly
expanding the same buffer.  Try configuring with --enable-zsh-mem to see
whether the behavior improves.