Type mismatches in safe_read and friends?

Hi folks,

I'm starting to learn a little C, and I figured I'd learn from the masters ;-) I needed to read in some data from the network, and I figured the safe_* calls would be a good example of how to do it correctly.

So, I took a look, and found:

static void safe_read(int fd, void *buffer, unsigned size)
{
         int n = 0;

         while (n < size) {
                 int ret = xread(fd, (char *) buffer + n, size - n);
                 if (ret < 0)
                         die("read error (%s)", strerror(errno));
                 if (!ret)
                         die("The remote end hung up unexpectedly");
                 n += ret;
         }
}

Surely size and 'n' should have the same signed-ness?

And, in fact, shouldn't they actually be size_t, rather than 'int', since xread is defined as:

static inline ssize_t xread(int fd, void *buf, size_t len)
{
         ssize_t nr;
         while (1) {
                 nr = read(fd, buf, len);
                 if ((nr < 0) && (errno == EAGAIN || errno == EINTR))
                         continue;
                 return nr;
         }
}

And finally, 'ret' in safe_read should be a 'ssize_t', not an int, right?

Or is it just a case that we don't really care, since we control the ranges of the values, and the underlying types are int anyway? Patches to follow if I get an indication that anyone cares, otherwise I'd be posting my question to a C newbies group. ;-)

Rogan

Rogan Dawes <lists@dawes.za.net> wrote:

...

...

Gah.  Yes.  And ret should be ssize_t.
 

Yes.

...

Oh, I see you noticed that too.  ;-)
 

It is sort of a case we don't care. These probably should be fixed. A patch would be nice. You want to learn C... ;-)

We currently assume that sizeof(unsigned) == sizeof(int) == 4, and that nobody is crazy enough to call this functions with values over ~2,000,000,000 so we don't practically have signed/unsigned issues here. Right now anyway. But it shouldn't be like this.

So size_t/ssize_t are the right types.

The one that cracks me up is what moron declared read(2) to take size_t as the input argument and ssize_t as the return value. So I can pass in a value that if successfully read by the kernel will actually be < 0 upon return, making my code think the read call failed - but it didn't. Riiiiiiiiight.

xread was just following that standard, broken model.

Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Ok. So I did a little patch, but I'm not sure whether I solved anything. Now we have an implicit cast from size_t to ssize_t in packet_read_line.

I guess this echoes your comment about requesting a large size_t, and getting a ssize_t result back. I suppose in theory we should be refusing to handle a length greater than that which would fit into a ssize_t? Or simply making sure to always return data smaller than max(ssize_t)?

Patch to follow.

Rogan