Today's quiz question

[Jack]

--- Gerald Combs wrote:
> Jack wrote:
...
> > 
> > I would say that this is a bug in ping, that it
> would 
> > allow x.y to be evaluated as a complete ip
> address.
> > But what is going on is that ping is calculating
> the
> > address based on the first and last dot numbers
> and
> > fills in the blanks with zeros. ...
> 
> The behavior is on purpose, and happens when ping
> passes the address to
> the inet_aton() function.  inet_aton() tries its
> best to convert
...
> 
> The man page has more information (under "Internet
> Addresses"):
>
>http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=inet_aton&sektion=3

Well just because it is done on purpose, and I
suspected it was. Does not make it not a bug. I still
consider it a bug. Here's my reasoning, if a program
does an interpretation of the user input that the user
might not have intended then ...
it might be a bug.
If a program behaves in an irrational way to input
then ... 
it might be a bug.
If a program fills in missing information then ...
it might be a bug.

It's certainly a nice little l33t trick for those in
the know to use for short-cutting, etc. But, it's
still
is translating what might have been an accidental
<CR>.
I might want to ping 12.1.0.5, but if my hand slips
and I hit return after 12.1 or 12.1.0 then I wind up
pinging the wrong address (12.0.0.1 or 12.1.0.0).
But even bugs have uses, whether they are intentional
or not. ;')

Thanks for the trivia, Gerald.

Brian D.

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