Age: 37 years, 2 months
Date introduced: August, 1977
Date fixed: October, 2014
OpenBSD
has only been around for 18 years, but until was recently susceptible
to a bug that was actually created well before it was born. In August
1977, future Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy
wrote the head function,
used to display the first lines of a file, for 1BSD, the initial
release of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative.
Joy’s original code was later
inherited by forks and sub-forks of BSD, such as 386BSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
15 years after Joy wrote
head, in 1992, it was discovered that,
under certain circumstances, it could raise an error, due to the use of a function called
freopen to open files and streams for reading, which didn’t play nicely with
stdin.
Keith Bostic applied to the fix to 4.4BSD, but the bug remained in some
BSD-derivatives, such as NetBSD, which was based on 386BSD in 1993,
itself forked from 4.3BSD in 1989, which didn’t have Bostic’s fix.
Subsequently, the bug was present when OpenBSD was created from NetBSD
in 1996. In October 2014, Ingo Schwarze finally rectified the 18
year-old problem by
merging Bostic’s 22 year-old fix into OpenBSD, a mere 37 years after the Joy wrote the original code.
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