Re: Reading past EOF characters in tar files?

[Cubes]

Does it quit at the same character ('od -c' is your friend here), or the same line or byte position in the file? What about other files, with different data? What happens if you construct a file with the suspect character in different positions, and feed that in?

A code snippet of at least the part that's quitting on you would be helpful, as would some readable representation of the data it's choking on.

[jepri]

Sorry, OK, my bad. It's the while loop quitting. But why does this:

while (my $char = &getchar ) {

return false when $getchar returns a \0 ? It's still a successful assignment, so I thought it would be true.

BTW thanks for the tip about od. I hadn't seen that one before.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

[Cubes]

Without looking things up, I'm thinking that because the value being assigned (and thus the value of the assignment) is zero, the conditional is turning up false. I think what you really want to do is test the gotten char against the empty string.

[bikeNomad]

What does getchar return? Does it return a number (the numeric value of the character) or a string with the character?

In any event, you're going to have problems with that test. If getchar returns the numeric character value, it's going to stop at the first NUL (0) character. If it returns the character itself, it'll stop if the character is "0" (0x30).

[petdance]

Aside: for those of you who use vim, you have a snazzy little tool called xxd that does all the stuff od -c does, and then some.

xoxo,
Andy
--
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