Re: Stealth problem with MHonArc

[Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu>]

On March 20, 2001 at 10:23, Earl Hood wrote:

> I have not had time to see what exactly about the message causes the
> crash, but the message is a big nested multipart 240K, with HTML parts.
> Also the HTML parts have stylesheets (which mhonarc attempts to
> strip), but there are no binary attachments.  My guess is a problem
> with the regular expression engine since bad resource files have been
> known to cause perl to crash (where a resource used in a regex is
> not properly closed in a resource file).

The user who gave the sample message sent me a follow-up that
isolated the problem (at least with the message given):

    I found out the regexp killing Perl interpreter :
    It is located in mhtxthtml.pl, in filter() function :
	$data =~ s/<!(?:--(?:[^-]|-[^-])*--\s*)+>//go;

    I commented it and everything went fine.

Apparently, the problem is not specific to MHonArc since others
have encountered crashess with other Perl software.  My guess is there
are bugs with perl's regex engine.

--ewh