[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#693960: Bug#693960: sysvinit: Undocumented, obscure limit for "process" field in inittab entries

[Roger Leigh]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 05:30:31PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Nov 2012, Johannes Truschnigg wrote:
> > Package: sysvinit
> > Version: 2.88dsf-13.1+squeeze1
> > Severity: minor
> > Tags: patch
> > 
> > 
> > I added a new entry to inittab on a busy host which did not seem to start upon
> > invoking `telinit q`. Syslog received the following message:
> > 
> > Nov 22 10:16:29 r7 init: /etc/inittab[93]: process field too long
> > 
> > This limit (127 characters) is not documented in man 5 inittab, nor anywhere
> > else I looked. In init's source file, there are error messages the explicitely
> > state length limits for other fields in inittab (which a user is much less
> > likely to overflow, I think), which seems kind of weird.
> 
> Eh, should we also increase that limit to something larger [if it is
> feasible to do so] ?

Looks like it's just the process field in struct _child_
(src/init.h); but there's also a static line buffer.  We
could potentially make this dynamically allocated with
imalloc; or just make it longer and also increase the
line buffer size accordingly.

(It's kind of horrible that they hard coded the size
when checking, rather than using sizeof())


Regards,
Roger

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