Re:Sshole
by odo1242 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:34PM
(#50381895)
Returning a string on error honestly is defensible, the question is why the string was “*” instead of like “crypt ERROR: input password cannot be longer than 256 characters” lol
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Precisely.
No. Musl claims (claimed?) to be strictly POSIX compliant, and POSIX requires crypt to return NULL on errors.
"*" is what's been historically used to represent an invalid/no value in passwd/shadow, so it makes some sense.
Of course given the chance that one might do a direct string comparison between crypt's return and the passwd/shadow file's hash field it was still a not well thought out choice.