Re: dd.c crash coreutils-5.97

[Martin Ellis]

[ Apologies if this doesn't thread correctly - I'm not subscribed, so can't 
just hit reply.  Please CC any replies. ]

Regarding this backtrace:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-09/msg00017.html

FWIW, my backup script was failing, so I looked into this today:

From around line 550 of dd.c:
  fprintf (stderr,
           ngettext ("1 byte (1 B) copied",
                     "%"PRIuMAX" bytes (%s) copied",
                     MIN (w_bytes, ULONG_MAX)),
           w_bytes,
           human_readable (w_bytes, hbuf, human_opts, 1, 1));

The problem is that, if the locale matching $LANG has been built
(for me that's en_GB.UTF-8), then ngettext appears to return something of
the form:

%<PRIuMAX> bytes (%s) copied

(To be honest, although I see what's causing the crash, I'm not sure
why the string looks exactly like that)

This string is then passed as the format to fprintf - where %<PRIuMAX>
should be something like %llu.

I'm working around it by using "unset LANG" before the backup
script is run.

Cheers,
Martin