We found a bug in the split command of Mac OS

Yesterday my friend Marcelo Nery and I found a bug in the split command of Mac OS. At first, I was surprised (we don’t expect to find bugs in core tools like grep, ls, split, wc…, right?) and almost expected to find the same bug in the Linux version of split. At least in the split of Ubuntu distribution, that was not the case. The bug is presented only in the Mac OS version.

The bug

Consider the file zero.log created with the following Common Lisp code (actually for the rest of the post you don’t need to understand the code):

( with-open-file ( out "zero.log" :element-type ' ( unsigned-byte 8 ) :direction :output :if-exists :supersede :external-format :utf-8 ) ( loop for char across ( format nil "AB_CDE~%F~%G~%" ) do ( if ( equal char #\_ ) ( loop for i from 1 to 3 do ( write-byte 0 out )) ( write-byte ( char-code char ) out ))))

This file content could be inspected with hexdump command:

$ hexdump -C zero.log 00000000 41 42 00 00 00 43 44 45 0a 46 0a 47 0a |AB...CDE.F.G.| 0000000d

That is, the file has three 0 bytes in the first line right after the B letter and before the C letter. Now we want to split this file one line per file.

The Linux version of split works as expected, it splits the file keeping the zero bytes unchanged.

$ split -1 zero.log $ for f in x?? ; do echo "---Begin: $f " ; cat $f ; echo "---End: $f " ; done ---Begin : xaa ABCDE ---End : xaa ---Begin : xab F ---End : xab ---Begin : xac G ---End : xac

Moreover, the sum of bytes of the x?? files is equal the number of bytes in the zero.log file, 13 bytes.

Nevertheless, the Mac OS version of split produces an unexpected output. The letter F is merged with the begining of the first line althouth it is in the second line of the zero.log file. Besides that, the zero bytes causes the Mac OS split to ignore the rest of the first line of zero.log causing a lost of data. The sum of the bytes of the x?? files in Mac OS is only 6 bytes.

$ split -1 zero.log $ for f in x?? ; do echo "---Begin: $f " ; cat $f ; echo "---End: $f " ; done ---Begin : xaa ABF ---End : xaa ---Begin : xab G ---End : xab

Reporting the bug

I reported the bug to Apple using the Mac OS Feedback form.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.