14 Feb
2018
14 Feb
'18
11:47 p.m.
So, in:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/s2/mv.c
what's the point of this piece of code:
p = place;
p1 = p;
while(*p++ = *argp3++);
p2 = p;
while(*p++ = *argp4++);
execl("/bin/cp","cp", p1, p2, 0);
I mean, I get that it's copying the two strings pointed to by 'argp3' and
'argp4' into a temporary buffer at 'place', and leaving 'p1'
and 'p2' as
pointers to the copies of said strings, but... why is it doing that?
I at first thought that maybe the execl() call was smashing the stack (and
thus the copies pointed to by 'argp3' and 'argp4'), or something, but
I don't
think it does that. So why couldn't the code have just been:
execl("/bin/cp","cp", argp3, argp4, 0);
Is this code maybe just a left-over from some previous variant?
Noel