[musl] request: please detect reads from stdin with unflushed writes to stdout

[musl] request: please detect reads from stdin with unflushed writes to stdout

[Lorenzo Beretta]

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Hello,

there are a few programs around that do something like
printf("question: ");
fgets(ans, sizeof ans, stdin);

without fflushing stdout and get away with it because it happens to work
under glibc.
(fyi the ones I stumbled onto are mkfs.xfs and, vipw/vigr from util-linux,
then the developer noticed the same with chfn/chsh)

Ideally that would be taken care of by either some compiler warning (but
not even clang's -Weverything catches that) or by some static analysis
tool, but I couldn't find any.

A __very__ tentative and untested patch:
diff --git i/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c w/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c
index ea675da3..6b10f76c 100644
--- i/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c
+++ w/src/stdio/__stdio_read.c
@@ -8,6 +8,11 @@ size_t __stdio_read(FILE *f, unsigned char *buf, size_t
len)
  { .iov_base = f->buf, .iov_len = f->buf_size }
  };
  ssize_t cnt;
+ if (f == stdin) {
+ if (stdout->wpos != stdout->wbase) {
+ do_something(glibc);
+ }
+ }

  cnt = iov[0].iov_len ? syscall(SYS_readv, f->fd, iov, 2)
  : syscall(SYS_read, f->fd, iov[1].iov_base, iov[1].iov_len);



... with do_something() being either flushing stdout or printing some kind
of warning to stderr (isatty?) or to syslog.
Any suggestion, corrections etc are obviously very welcome.

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Re: [musl] request: please detect reads from stdin with unflushed writes to stdout

[Quentin Rameau]

> Hello,

Hi Lorenzo,

> there are a few programs around that do something like
> printf("question: ");
> fgets(ans, sizeof ans, stdin);
> 
> without fflushing stdout and get away with it because it happens to work
> under glibc.
> (fyi the ones I stumbled onto are mkfs.xfs and, vipw/vigr from util-linux,
> then the developer noticed the same with chfn/chsh)
> 
> Ideally that would be taken care of by either some compiler warning (but
> not even clang's -Weverything catches that) or by some static analysis
> tool, but I couldn't find any.
> 
> ... with do_something() being either flushing stdout or printing some kind
> of warning to stderr (isatty?) or to syslog.
> Any suggestion, corrections etc are obviously very welcome.

Suggestion: fix those broken programs!

If one wants to make sure what you print is flushed at a certain point,
ones have to flush the stream.