Possible bug in random name generation for mkostemp and friends

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 02/02/2013 05:26 PM, Michael Deutschmann wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013, "Anthony G. Basile" wrote:
>> Even though 'value' is declared static it is never initialized.  Isn't
>> this a problem?
>
> In C, statics are implicitly initialized to all-bits-zero.
>

After some digging around, I found this too.  Since I've never 
programmed this way, I just assumed it was the same as non-static.

> While I only know this offhand to be standards-required for static data
> declared at toplevel, there's no way under the Unix assembler/linker
> paradigm to specify that a non-stack variable is truly uninitialized.
>
> Adding a '= 0;' might be a style recommendation.  However, in past people
> often avoided that due to lazy compilers that would then put the object in
> the data section, wasting space in the final executable file.
>
> I also understand at one point GCC was deliberately so stupid in order to
> accomodate a common hack to do what, today, we do with the "_edata"
> linker-generated symbol.  Current GCC seems to be smart, though.
>
> ---- Michael Deutschmann <michael at talamasca.ocis.net>
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-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
(716) 829-8197