Two bugs & a smaller glitch
Posted: Thu May 21, 2015 11:50 pm
There are two VERY annoying things that bug me in aescrypt:
1. The decryption mode does NOT check if the filename has any (!) extension at all, let alone the extension .aes
Thus, if the file is renamed and then attempted to be decrypted, the last four characters are removed IN ANY CASE, even if the filename is shorter than four characters!
This results in destruction of the filename if it is longer than 4 chars but has no extension, and - even worse - in a complete crash (!!!) (i.e. segmentation fault on Linux and a crash message on Windows) if the name length is less or equal 4 characters!
As the encrypted file is disappears anyway, why not simply keep the original name if there is no extension?
This would be the sensible way to do (and I have a script which does exactly that to work around this shortcoming)
2. The windows version can't handle forward slashes (i.e. file URLs) in the -o option, which is a problem when using it in cygwin - one can't specify any absolute or relative path other than a simple filename (i.e. one in the same directory), which somehow beats the purpose of the -o option.
* Some other glitch I noticed:
In cygwin aescrypt apparently can't read the user input from the keyboard when entering a password - passwords only work when specifying them with -p
There was another small glitch, but I forgot what it was... I might be back
1. The decryption mode does NOT check if the filename has any (!) extension at all, let alone the extension .aes
Thus, if the file is renamed and then attempted to be decrypted, the last four characters are removed IN ANY CASE, even if the filename is shorter than four characters!
This results in destruction of the filename if it is longer than 4 chars but has no extension, and - even worse - in a complete crash (!!!) (i.e. segmentation fault on Linux and a crash message on Windows) if the name length is less or equal 4 characters!
As the encrypted file is disappears anyway, why not simply keep the original name if there is no extension?
This would be the sensible way to do (and I have a script which does exactly that to work around this shortcoming)
2. The windows version can't handle forward slashes (i.e. file URLs) in the -o option, which is a problem when using it in cygwin - one can't specify any absolute or relative path other than a simple filename (i.e. one in the same directory), which somehow beats the purpose of the -o option.
* Some other glitch I noticed:
In cygwin aescrypt apparently can't read the user input from the keyboard when entering a password - passwords only work when specifying them with -p
There was another small glitch, but I forgot what it was... I might be back