[MacTUG] The 25-year-old BSD bug

Tue May 13 13:01:15 EDT 2008

The 25-year-old BSD bug

Posted May 13th 2008 9:00AM by Robert Palmer
Filed under: Humor, UNIX / BSD

Today in 1983, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson may have topped the charts, but a slight bug in the *dir() library was found only a few days ago by OpenBSD developer Marc Balmer (no rela -- oh, wait). OS News has the entire amusing tale of the bug in BSD (the UNIX foundation of Mac OS X) that's been alive and kicking for nearly 25 years. Balmer contacted Marshall Kirk McKusick, the original developer of the *dir() library, who confirmed the error.

Thankfully, the fix was simple, but Balmer kidded, "[s]orry that it took us almost 25 years to fix it."

Thanks, Cameron!

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/05/13/the-25-year-old-bsd-bug/