Underhanded C (the explanation)

In my last post I provided what would have been my entry to the underhanded C contest if it was still active. In this post I will give the details of how the code works and what bonus points I tried to target.

My solution really boils down to an off-by-one error that is hidden in a return value. A sharp observer would certainly see that I bail silently in the middle of parsing the comment section when a full luggage record was already input; that would be a huge breadcrumb to the source of the error in an investigation/review.

Due to how I handle newlines in the grab_line function it is possible to read only a newline character and return a 0-length result (considered an error in the context of grab_luggage_entry). If any entry is exactly BUFF_SIZE characters long the entire entry is silently discarded because the last read suffers from the 0-length return.

Here are the evaluation criteria and my attention to them:

Short code:
The critical section is less than 70 lines of code (with comments) but the logic for filtering made things a bit longer. This was by far the hardest target to hit with respect to the contest

Universal:
This code works on multiple platforms (Windows/Linux) but in different ways since the line endings are different ('\n' vs. '\r\n') and only '\n' is used in the check

Plausible deniability:
Comment size is unbounded in the spec so using fgets is justified/plausible as a input mechanism
getline is not portable and we want to work on multiple platforms (more justification for fgets)

Syntax coloring:
Passes syntax coloring, high compiler warnings and valgrind tests


... with bonus points for...


Mis-routing appears innocent:
The length of the line is the only qualifier to misroute making the error appear arbitrary and random in most contexts

Flexible mis-routing:
An informed operator may arbitrarily choose to trigger the behavior for nasty patrons (qualifies for spite bonus as well)
Additionally, by making the buffer size a macro (gcc -DBUFF_SIZE=128) behavior can be modified without changing the code.


While the contest appears no longer active I still enjoyed spending some time thinking up how I would write this. I've seen past winners' entries and this is certainly not of that caliber but it was nice to see that I was able to address the majority of the scoring points in at least some way.