Re: Strange strings in GCC compiled code

[Mumit Khan <khan at xraylith dot wisc dot EDU>]

Nimar Arora <nimar_arora@yahoo.com> writes:
> I'm using MINGW. i.e. the version which relies only on CRTDLL.
> 
> -- Nimar
> 
> --- Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > I recently downloaded and installed GCC-2.95 on
> > Win95 and compiled the
> > > standard Hello World program. The program runs
> > fine but after running
> > > 'strings' on the executable, a.exe, I found the
> > following HTML tags
> > > which include private information like login name
> > on Web mail servers.
> > > What is going on?
> > 
> > Please always make a point of telling which port of
> > GCC are you
> > using.  If it is the DJGPP port, I might have a
> > solution for this
> > problem.

This is an OS (if you can call Windows 9x an OS ;-) issue, which does
not zero out the file area if you seek past the end and then write.
NT does handle it correctly, and I believe Windows 2000 does as well.

You can always complain to the OS vendor as to why they allow such a
hole in the OS.

I suppose we'll have to deal with this in binutils sooner or later.
It's on my todo list (and I have contributed patches that I haven't
had time to look at yet). Binutils maintainer Ian Taylor knows about
this problem as well. Cygwin works around this issue, but since Mingw
uses Microsoft's own runtime, we can't do the same for Mingw without
some ugly hacks.

Regards,
Mumit