This is my first patch submission. I've tried to follow the directions found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/patches.html, but if I've screwed things up, please let me know. During the review of static analysis results, we discovered a functional, but non-portable, use of execve(). For example: char *cmd[] = { "/path/to/some/file", NULL }; execve(cmd[0], cmd, NULL); The call succeeds. Yet, the static analysis tool (rightly) pointed out that envp could be dereferenced. But digging into glibc and the kernel, it appears that like argv, envp when NULL is treated as if it were an empty list. So, to clear things up, I'm submitting this patch to update the man page to indicate that envp is treated like argv. I generated the below patch from git after pulling the latest. I hope there is sufficient information in the patch. Thanks, Pete >From c2822b3ba5ef8769eed683e4856247274e016ea5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 --- man2/execve.2 | 6 ++++-- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/man2/execve.2 b/man2/execve.2 index cc91bff..a0b48fc 100644 --- a/man2/execve.2 +++ b/man2/execve.2 @@ -494,10 +494,12 @@ and white spaces in .I optional-arg are used to delimit the arguments. -On Linux, +On Linux, either .I argv +or +.I envp can be specified as NULL, -which has the same effect as specifying this argument +which has the same effect as specifying these arguments as a pointer to a list containing a single NULL pointer. .B "Do not take advantage of this misfeature!" It is nonstandard and nonportable: -- 1.8.3.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
