From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!cbosgd!mark
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: Re: Cryptic messages
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.3135
Posted: Thu Feb 17 13:24:39 1983
Received: Tue Feb 22 07:52:30 1983
References: <196@watcgl.UUCP>

"parse date string" is a combination of B news stretching the manual
page slightly and USG UNIX not being very robust.  What happens is,
when you do a followup, it uses
	mktemp("/tmp/folXXXXXX")
to create a temp file name to edit the followup in.  Fine.  Now, if
you happen to do a SECOND followup in the same news session, it
executes the same code.  But since mktemp overwrites the argument
in place, you have
	mktemp("/tmp/folA01234")
which is not documented to work.  It happens to work ok in 4.1BSD,
but in USG it seems to clobber the null at the end, resulting in
the string running over into the next character string in memory,
which happens to be "Cannot parse date string".  Thus, you get
something along the lines of
	inews -t the real title < /tmp/folA012345Cannot parse date string
and since the shell takes out the "< /tmp/folA012345Cannot" part,
you are left with
	inews -t the real title parse date string

2.10 has been changed to copy the string literal into a temporary
location and call mktemp on that temporary.