vreport: sanitize ASCII control charsjk/vreport-sanitize

Our error() and die() calls may report messages with
arbitrary data (e.g., filenames or even data from a remote
server). Let's make it harder to cause confusion with
mischievous filenames. E.g., try:

  git rev-parse "$(printf "\rfatal: this argument is too sneaky")" --

or

  git rev-parse "$(printf "\x1b[5mblinky\x1b[0m")" --

Let's block all ASCII control characters, with the exception
of TAB and LF. We use both in our own messages (and we are
necessarily sanitizing the complete output of snprintf here,
as we do not have access to the individual varargs). And TAB
and LF are unlikely to cause confusion (you could put
"\nfatal: sneaky\n" in your filename, but it would at least
not _cover up_ the message leading to it, unlike "\r").

We'll replace the characters with a "?", which is similar to
how "ls" behaves. It might be nice to do something less
lossy, like converting them to "\x" hex codes. But replacing
with a single character makes it easy to do in-place and
without worrying about length limitations. This feature
should kick in rarely enough that the "?" marks are almost
never seen.

We'll leave high-bit characters as-is, as they are likely to
be UTF-8 (though there may be some Unicode mischief you
could cause, which may require further patches).

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/usage.c b/usage.c
index e4fa6d2f03..50a6ccee44 100644
--- a/usage.c
+++ b/usage.c
@@ -12,7 +12,13 @@ void vreportf(const char *prefix, const char *err, va_list params)
 {
 	char msg[4096];
 	FILE *fh = error_handle ? error_handle : stderr;
+	char *p;
+
 	vsnprintf(msg, sizeof(msg), err, params);
+	for (p = msg; *p; p++) {
+		if (iscntrl(*p) && *p != '\t' && *p != '\n')
+			*p = '?';
+	}
 	fprintf(fh, "%s%s\n", prefix, msg);
 }