Re: Possible unsafe use of strncat in sbin/sysctl/sysctl.c

[Julio Merino <jmmv%julipedia.org@localhost>]

On 8/23/11 6:22 PM, Marc Balmer wrote:
> Am 24.08.11 00:08, schrieb Joerg Sonnenberger:
> > On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 09:58:53PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> > > On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:52:11PM +0200, Marc Balmer wrote:
> > >   >  (void)wait!  That was a pure personal remark.  I really don't know where
> > >   >  that (void)bla idiom comes from, and I obviously don't (void)like it.
> > >
> > > It's an artifact of our stupid lint(1).
> >
> > Not really, it is used by other analyzers to mean "yes, I know this
> > returns something, but I don't care". The major exception of course is
> > that GCC broke it for the attributed usage -- half of the pain of
> > dealing with modern glibc in this regard.
>
> But that is kind of, well, unneeded.  A compiler can detect that I don't
> use the return value by seeing that I don't use the return value.

What GCC/glibc did is enforce the checking of unused values from most 
libc/syscall functions.  Putting (void) in front of these calls does not 
shut the warnings up.