Re: gzip 1.3.11 released for testing

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden writes:

> I just noticed an old bug in gzip.  The global foreground is never
> initialized.

OK, but is that a bug?  C89 says that static variables must be
initialized to zero.  These days GNU software tends to assume C89 or
better (it's too soon to assume C99).

Anyway, I installed this patch:

2007-02-11  Paul Eggert  <address@hidden>

        * gzip.c (foreground): Initialize to zero.  This doesn't fix a bug
        since C guarantees it's zero, but it's more consistent with the
        rest of the code.  Problem reported by Mark Adler.

--- gzip.c      5 Feb 2007 20:54:26 -0000       1.14
+++ gzip.c      12 Feb 2007 05:24:32 -0000
@@ -199,7 +199,7 @@ int verbose = 0;      /* be verbose (-v)
 int quiet = 0;        /* be very quiet (-q) */
 int do_lzw = 0;       /* generate output compatible with old compress (-Z) */
 int test = 0;         /* test .gz file integrity */
-int foreground;       /* set if program run in foreground */
+int foreground = 0;   /* set if program run in foreground */
 char *program_name;   /* program name */
 int maxbits = BITS;   /* max bits per code for LZW */
 int method = DEFLATED;/* compression method */