Subject: RE: Bug report for run.exe with patch
From: "Jonathan Kamens" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:04:10 -0500
List-Id: <cygwin.cygwin.com>

This is a bug in a program that is installed and used in pretty much every
single Cygwin installation in the world.

Other people have reported encountering the bug.

I've identified the bug and provided a patch, three weeks ago.

Can I please get someone in a position to release the fix to acknowledge my
existence?

Much obliged,

  jik

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Kamens [jik at kamens dot us] 
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2011 11:22 AM
To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
Subject: RE: Bug report for run.exe with patch

ACK?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Kamens [jik at kamens dot us] 
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2010 2:00 PM
To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
Subject: Bug report for run.exe with patch

Several people have reported problems with run.exe complaining about being
unable to execute programs.

The typical symptoms of the problem are that the user clicks on a link in
the Start menu that uses run.exe and gets back an error pop-up from run.exe
that looks like this:

Error could not start C:\cygwin\bin\emacs-X11.exe [some extra characters
here that shouldn’t be] -display 127.0.0.1:0.0

I just encountered this issue and tracked down the root cause, which is that
run.exe doesn’t null-terminate the data returned by readlink(). According to
the readlink(3) man page on Linux, “Conforming applications should not
assume that the returned contents of the symbolic link are null-terminated,”
and indeed, at least in some circumstances they are not.

I have attached a patch.

Share and enjoy. :-)

Thanks,

  Jonathan Kamens
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