[MPlayer-users] patch to fix illegal memory access in mplayer (fwd)

[Thilo Schulz]

Am Sonntag, 6. Oktober 2002 16:21 schrieb Nilmoni Deb:
> Also, I recommend using electric fence for catching memory abuse as in
> many cases the program may not segfault (lucky escape !!) for the
> particular movie file, but electric fence will catch the abuse anyhow.

Indeed, Electric Fence is a VERY useful tool for hunting memory allocation 
bugs and buffer overflows down that would normally not lead to a crash but 
only hours later by another function that was not the buggy one, but due to 
faulty memory triggers the segfault. With the help of it I managed to debug a 
piece of software that was filled with these kinds of bugs and was not 
written by me.

Bugs that would have normally been found after weeks of search now were 
suddenly at hand, with a finger pointing to its exact location :)
Because there certainly are still stupid memory bugs in there i'm currently 
running that software in gdb & electric fence linked to it all the time :D

How it works, you can see at http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/

 - Thilo Schulz