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References: <1262655497-21263-1-git-send-email-michael.a.hwang@gmail.com>
	 <20100105094829.613883ab@news01>
	 <CD9DD5CC-D5C7-4F9F-90F4-5039F535FABB@cis.strath.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:02:55 +0100
Message-ID: <237967ef1001060602q7b95e74dq332464de6ce3f34b@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Removed arbitrary limitations on array accesses
From: Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@gmail.com>
To: zsh-workers@zsh.org
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2010/1/6 Duncan Sinclair <duncan.sinclair@cis.strath.ac.uk>:
>
> On 5 Jan 2010, at 9:48 am, Peter Stephenson wrote:
>
>> On Mon,  4 Jan 2010 20:38:17 -0500
>> Michael Hwang <michael.a.hwang@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> This issue was brought up on IRC. It appears that while there is no lim=
it
>>> on
>>> how many array elements can be stored, there is a limit to how many can
>>> be
>>> accessed. This patch removes these limits.
>>
>> Those have been there for a long time.  I don't have any evidence that
>> they're doing a lot of good but we have had people creating positional
>> parameters with <long_number>=3Dsomething and wondering why it uses a lo=
t of
>> memory.  I suppose this is similar.  The arbitrary limit is not very
>> useful and also undocumented; most people wouldn't miss it if it wasn't
>> there, certainly.
>
> IIRC, the problem was that is you typed a big number at the zsh prompt an=
d
> hit tab, the shell would either hang for a long time or crash (out of
> memory).
>
> % 99999999999<tab>
>
> I reported this as a bug =E2=80=93 the shell should not crash so easily.
>
> There is probably a way of preventing this problem though without putting
> arbitrary limits on the size of array indices.

There are other similar ways you can crash a shell anyway,
alt-111111111111 1 and `yes` for example. I'm not sure if it's worth
trying to fix all of them.

--=20
Mikael Magnusson