Re: [libvirt] Sys::Virt Perl bindings - calling newSVpv with unsafe length

Dan, After tracking down a very obscure bug in hivex & libguestfs Perl bindings, I started looking for places where we call newSVpv with a variable length argument that could be zero. In such cases, one should call newSVpvn instead, otherwise Perl will try to use strlen() to calculate the length of the data buffer when length is passed in as zero [I'm sure you are aware of this already].

There seems to be one such case in the Sys::Virt bindings: http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/DANBERR/Sys-Virt-0.2.3/Virt.xs CODE: if ((bytes = virSecretGetValue(sec, &len, flags)) == NULL) { _croak_error(virConnGetLastError(virSecretGetConnect(sec))); } RETVAL = newSVpv((char*)bytes, len); Maybe 'len' can never be zero here, but I think it's safer to turn this into a call to newSVpvn anyway.

Also, if you look at the source to newSVpv: http://github.com/mirrors/perl/blob/blead/sv.c#L7752 You'll see there is an extra test, not present with newSVpvn. So it's better to always call newSVpvn wherever there is a constant-sized buffer, eg in code like this: if ((virDomainGetUUID(dom, rawuuid)) < 0) { _croak_error(virConnGetLastError(virDomainGetConnect(dom))); } RETVAL = newSVpv((char*)rawuuid, sizeof(rawuuid));