[fpc-devel] TProcess empty parameter

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 2 May 2015, Alfred wrote:

> Hello to all.
>
> While working on fpcup, I did encounter the following problem.
>
> Fpcup has modules that implement automatic download and install of packages.
> One of these modules is indy.
>
> Indy has a svn server that needs a username. No password is needed.
> However, if a username is given to a command line svn client, this svn-client 
> wants to have a password too.
> This password has to be empty.
>
> Fpcup uses TProcess to execute commands.
> But it seems that TProcess cannot handle empty parameters correctly (on 
> Linux).

That is debatable:

The question is: how does a C program interpret a Nil argv[] pointer ?
Because a Nil pointer is added to the Argv[] array, so the argument is there.

> It processes the parameters, including the empty password, by generating a 
> list of (p)pchar strings.
> It uses strnew to accomplish this.
> But strnew returns nil for an empty string (Delphi does not return nil in 
> this case).

Do you have a test for this ?

>
> My question:
>
> Is this expected behavior of TProcess ?
> Or should TProcess be changed.
> Or strnew (and strpas) ?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Additional info
> Sourcefile : process.inc, inside fpc\packages\fcl-process\src\unix :
> Function StringsToPCharList(List : TStrings) : PPChar;
> Var
>  I : Integer;
>  S : String;
> begin
>  I:=(List.Count)+1;
>  GetMem(Result,I*sizeOf(PChar));
>  PPCharArray(Result)^[List.Count]:=Nil;
>  For I:=0 to List.Count-1 do
>  begin
>    S:=List[i];
>    Result[i]:=StrNew(PChar(S)); <--------------------------- here

Pchar(S) will return a pointer to an empty string (essentially, a pointer to a #0 char)
if S is empty. That means that StrNew would need to be adapted.

However, for backwards compatibility with FPC, it may be better to simply change 
TProcess to add a pointer to a zero character #0

Michael.