Handling argc==0 in the kernel

Posted Jan 28, 2022 20:20 UTC (Fri) by matthias (subscriber, #94967)
In reply to: Handling argc==0 in the kernel by dskoll
Parent article: Handling argc==0 in the kernel

Why not just pass "", i.e. the empty string?

If a callee does not inspect argv[0], then any string is good. If a callee expects some non-empty string as argv[0], then calling with argv pointing to { NULL } does not work today. And there is no reason why it should work tomorrow. Doing anything else than aborting with an error would only be to be backwards compatible with the current situation.

The only reason this could break anything that is working now that I can images is, that some callee actually expects to be called with argc==0 and argv pointing to { NULL }. But this would be really weird.

Handling argc==0 in the kernel

Posted Jan 30, 2022 21:43 UTC (Sun) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link]

You could run into issues with programs that check argc. They may expect it to be zero, or they may expect it to be 1 with a valid path, but they may not expect it to be 1 with an invalid path.