Strange fread(3) Behavior with CVS glibc

[Chris Ahna]

Hi,

I'm seeing some strange behavior from fread(3) with the CVS (mainline)
glibc.  fread(3) is returning zero whenever the first character it reads
is 0xff.  It doesn't seem to react like this to 0xff characters appearing
anywhere else.  I'm seeing this on both ia64-unknown-linux and i686-
pc-linux-gnu.  This is breaking GNU ld on my i686-pc-linux-gnu box.

I can't reproduce this behavior with a 2.2.4 version on either platform.
Is it legal (expected?) for fread(3) to behave this way?  I've been
poring over documentation and can't convince myself either way.  Please
CC: me on responses if you'd like more information.  Thanks,

Chris