bug in bibtex

[Roderick Bloem]

Hi,

I think I have found a bug in bibtex. Could you please tell me where to
send it?

Best,

Roderick Bloem

Description of supposed bug, in case you are interested.

If two slashes appear in a directory name in BIBINPUTS, bibtex searches
the entire subtree rooted at the place where the double slashes appear.

We have a machine with a large disk mounted over NFS. One of our users
by mistake had a homedirectory entry in the passwd file that read
/home/student//wangc. The /home/student directory is a huge directory
mounted over NFS. Environment variable BIBINPUTS read
".:/projects/development/bib/bibliography:/home/student//wangc/TEX".
This resulted in bibtex searching the entire directory tree under
/home/students which takes hours. If I change BIBINUTS to
".:/projects/development/bib/bibliography:/home/student//wangc/TEX",
everything is fine. I think (but do not know) that // is a valid
alternative to /, which would make this a bug.

I can send you the system call traces, if need be. I strongly suspect
the same bug exists in xdvi and dvips.

Here is the nitty-gritty.
satchmo(~): uname -a
Linux satchmo.colorado.edu 2.2.12-20smp #1 SMP Mon Sep 27 10:34:45 EDT
1999 i686 unknown (this is RedHat 6.1)
satchmo(~): bibtex -v
BibTeX (Web2C 7.3.1) 0.99c
kpathsea version 3.3.1
Copyright (C) 1999 Oren Patashnik.
Kpathsea is copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
There is NO warranty. Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the BibTeX copyright and
the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the files
named COPYING and the BibTeX source.
Primary author of BibTeX: Oren Patashnik.
Kpathsea written by Karl Berry and others.

satchmo(~): xdvi -v
xdvi version 22.05d-k
satchmo(~): dvips -v
This is dvips(k) 5.86 Copyright 1999 Radical Eye Software
(www.radicaleye.com)

[Robin Fairbairns]

> Description of supposed bug, in case you are interested.
>
> If two slashes appear in a directory name in BIBINPUTS, bibtex searches
> the entire subtree rooted at the place where the double slashes appear.

this is actually documented behaviour for the kpathsea library which
bibtex (along with the rest of the tex suite) uses for finding files.

robin