Re: Forwarded: Segmentation Fault via recursive loop in Gawk

[Paul Eggert]

In glibc (and Gnulib) the regular-expression code has long been 
maintained under the philosophy that the code cannot handle arbitrary 
regular expressions. Any code that lets the user specify an arbitrary 
regular expression is suspect, and this includes Awk scripts. (This is 
also true for C libraries other than glibc/Gnulib.)

It'd be nice if someone could fix regex bugs like these in the glibc 
regex code, but nobody has stepped forward to do that, and frankly it's 
low priority. In the meantime, don't write Awk scripts with adversarial 
regexps.