OpenBSD Journal

Improving bcd(6)

Contributed by pitrh on from the doing the punch card shuffle dept.

Ted Unangst (tedu@) has written a blog post about fixing bugs in bcd(6), keeping with the recent trend of finding and fixing ancient bugs:

Owing to its BSD heritage, OpenBSD ships with a few games installed in /usr/games. Quite a few, in fact. There are more programs in games (46) than in /bin (43). Some of them aren’t really games, but more like toys, but nevertheless there they are. They aren’t exactly the focus of OpenBSD, but they’re still part of the system and do get the occasional maintenance update.

One such game is bcd, which prints out punch card looking diagrams of input strings. I made a few improvements to it recently.

As they say, read the whole thing.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By noah (131.191.82.6) on

    I love this project more and more every day, for exactly things like this.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (81.83.83.198) on

      > I love this project more and more every day, for exactly things like this.
      ditto.

  2. By FenderQ (24.68.120.67) on www.fenderq.com

    Considering the use of arc4random(3) in OpenBSD, one could say these games are quite challenging.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (59.189.59.70) on

    my 2 cents... do games really belong into openbsd having limited resources? well it's your call guys.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (71.17.96.237) on

      > my 2 cents... do games really belong into openbsd having limited resources? well it's your call guys.


      I for one would be saddened to see the games go. I still play them semi-regularly, and as a former morse code operator I appreciate morse(6). (if only it supported audio!) I don't imagine they use much development time, and it's not likely they're developing more.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (75.87.148.96) on

        > > my 2 cents... do games really belong into openbsd having limited resources? well it's your call guys.
        >
        >
        > I for one would be saddened to see the games go. I still play them semi-regularly, and as a former morse code operator I appreciate morse(6). (if only it supported audio!) I don't imagine they use much development time, and it's not likely they're developing more.

        Try morseplayer

    2. By Anonymous Coward (204.191.16.98) on

      > my 2 cents... do games really belong into openbsd having limited resources? well it's your call guys.

      They are still optional, you don't have to install gameXX.tgz if you don't want/need it.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (171.25.193.20) on

      > my 2 cents... do games really belong into openbsd having limited resources? well it's your call guys.

      I think the bigger concern is that so many of them are setuid and show up in the weekly (in)security email.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (2001:4b10:1002:cc05:5c95:6556:45ef:bef3) on

        > > my 2 cents... do games really belong into openbsd having limited resources? well it's your call guys.
        >
        > I think the bigger concern is that so many of them are setuid and show up in the weekly (in)security email.

        None of the games are setuid. A few are setgid games (to allow writing scores to a common file) so maybe if there are bugs people can use them to cheat or damage the score files, the worst possible outcome that I can imagine is if a bug allows a scorefile to be modified in such a way that it triggers another bug and causes bad behaviour when the file is read back.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (93.38.75.136) on

    [FLAME MODE ON]

    I was happy to see etcXX.tgz and xetcXX.tgz being moved to the attic. It's your turn gameXX.tgz!

    [FLAME MODE OFF]

    Comments
    1. By Alexander (88.206.183.22) on

      > [FLAME MODE ON]
      >
      > I was happy to see etcXX.tgz and xetcXX.tgz being moved to the attic. It's your turn gameXX.tgz!
      >
      > [FLAME MODE OFF]

      They weren't moved to the attic. They were moved into base and xbase. Should we move games in there too...? ;-)

  5. By Anonymous Coward (84.251.44.249) on

    This kind of "development" is the reason why I will not donate anything to OpenBSD.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (2001:470:b01e:3:9cd4:cdbc:5c23:cbb) on

      > This kind of "development" is the reason why I will not donate anything to OpenBSD.

      Fixing a few bugs is the reason you will not donate? That is simply crazy.

    2. By rusty (100.32.52.252) on

      > This kind of "development" is the reason why I will not donate anything to OpenBSD.

      Hell I would like to see more "games" in base.

      "thats" wrong with this project. not enough games.
      Do the devs not have any fun little programs that could be added.

      Comments
      1. By Stefan Sperling (stsp) on http://stsp.name

        > Do the devs not have any fun little programs that could be added.

        Sure. I have this: git://git.user.in-berlin.de/stsp/bike
        But since it uses colours I doubt it would be acceptable for base.

    3. By Lawrence Teo (lteo) on http://lteo.net

      Sure, but the irony is that you're very likely posting that comment from a system that uses OpenBSD code in some way, shape, or form.

    4. By Anonymous Coward (170.22.76.10) on

      > This kind of "development" is the reason why I will not donate anything to OpenBSD.

      Lets be honest here. You're the kind of <dirty name> who wouldn't be donating to OpenBSD anyway. You're just taking this as an excuse.

    5. By Daniel Gracia (84.127.228.237) guardame_el_secreto@yahoo.es on

      > This kind of "development" is the reason why I will not donate anything to OpenBSD.

      So you are telling us you'd never drink a cup of coffee at work and you'll never hire someone that want to make a break.

      Pretty silly for me, but still doable.

  6. By Anonymous Coward (69.178.112.52) on

    This kind of development is a reason why I donate to OpenBSD. I love the sense of historic continuity. Some of these games (e.g., trek) date back to the 70s, yet are still being touched up in OpenBSD. That's really cool!

    P.S. I am sick of the people here telling the devs how to spend their time. That's really shameful.

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