[Bugme-new] [Bug 13569] New: Examples in some pages make invalid use of the assert macro

[bugzilla-daemon at bugzilla.kernel.org]

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13569

           Summary: Examples in some pages make invalid use of the assert
                    macro
           Product: Documentation
           Version: unspecified
    Kernel Version: n/a
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: Linux
              Tree: Mainline
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P1
         Component: man-pages
        AssignedTo: documentation_man-pages at kernel-bugs.osdl.org
        ReportedBy: andrey.vihrov at gmail.com
        Regression: No


The purpose of the assert macro, defined in <assert.h>, is to provide a tool to
check for programming mistakes or program logic errors. However, the assert
macro must never be used to perform checks for run time errors, since, with the
NDEBUG macro defined, expressions within the assert macro invocations are not
evaluated/checked for, resulting in behavior that was not originally intended.

Currently (man-pages 3.20, Gentoo Linux), some pages contain example programs
that use assert to check for run time errors, specifically, like this:

#include <assert.h>

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    assert(argc == 2); /* Check for argc value was intended */
}

The proper way to do this is without assert, for example, like this:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    if (argc != 2)
    {
        fprintf(stderr, "invalid parameter count\n");
        exit(EXIT_FAILURE);       
    }
}

The pages affected in the core package are

execve(2)
pipe(2)
tee(2)
fmemopen(3)
mq_notify(3)
qsort(3)

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