corrupt trustdb caused by commandline?

[David Shaw]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 11:38:17PM -0400, Atom Smasher wrote:
> On Tue, 9 May 2006, David Shaw wrote:
> 
> >I'm not sure why you didn't have the problem in 1.4.2.  It should happen 
> >there as well.
> >
> >Try this patch.
> ===================
> 
> took me some time to try this out...
> 
> i tweaked the patch to drop it into 
> /usr/ports/security/gnupg/files/patch-stdout.reopen.patch (freeBSD ports), 
> reinstalled gpg and everything is now running smooth.
> 
> so...
>  * why was closing stdout causing gpg to have problems?

It's not a GPG thing, specifically.  Closing stdout (or stderr) is
actually a pretty dangerous thing to do on *any* program that opens
files and also uses printf.

Here's an example:

  fd=open("foo",O_WRONLY,0777);
  printf("hi there - I'm writing to a file\n");
  write(fd,"whee",4);

Normally, if you run this, you get "hi there" on stdout, and "whee" in
the file.  Close stdout before you run it, and the open() can end up
with fd 1 attached to "foo".  When you printf, you'll be printf-ing to
"foo" as well, mangling it.

If the goal is to squish stdout, you should redirect stdout to
/dev/null rather than closing it outright.

>  * will this patch be incorporated into production?

Yes.  Already has, actually.

>  * why was 1.4.2 not having problems with this?

Luck?  I'm honestly not sure - the code in 1.4.2 and 1.4.3 here is
nearly identical.

David