installation

Three here. Also a comment and a commented deb-src line.

cat /etc/apt/sources.list | head -n 1 | cut -d" " -f3

More standard ways are:

cat /etc/*-release lsb_release -a

And on Debian:

cat /etc/debian_version

That's on Raspbian as well, of course(?), and gives me "8.0", so numerically only, but it does incontrovertibly mean Jessie, yes.

And I'd like to say take your horse somewhere else to do it's business.

This is supposed to be a friendly newsgroup catering for people both new to the Raspberry Pi, and having a fair share of Linux experts. Many solutions are possible, but lets start with the one most appropriate to the OP's experience level.

---druck

Blame that on Debian, who use those stupid names instead of version numbers. Of course when you really want to use a name, it would have to follow some convention. Like starting with the 8th letter of the alphabet for version 8. But no.

Then give Ada a try. It does prevent you from a fair bit of stupid mistakes.

On Thu, 25 Feb 2016 18:26:56 +0100

It will catch type mismatches, out-of-bounds references and similar stuff but it won't fix faulty logic.

Thanks Mark. Gives Rasbian GNU/linux 7

Which makes me think that Wheezie and Jessie are android upgrades not Rasbian. So many computers but only one aging memory.

snipped-for-privacy@p73.f2.n3634.z1.b> 24 Feb 16 20:15, you wrote to Martin Gregorie:

Now that gives me :-wheezy

Correct. Type mismatches, out-of-bounds references and pointer errors is what I call stupid mistakes. How many cases of buffer overflow has been reported? How expensive was Heartbleed?

Can't happen with Ada, or at least I cannot see a way of provoking that.

Putting some effort into the program, it will also catch some faulty logic, like forgetting to take care of new enumeration values in a case statement.

But of course, it does not fix everything; like when you write

if a = b then

but you really mean

if a = c then

but at least, it does not try to assign anything to variable a in either case.

And you can be sure that a and b are of the same type, unless you have overridden "=", so you are not comparing apples with oranges

Look at /etc/apt/sources.list on your RPi and you'll see either 'wheezy' or 'jessie' is the third word on the only line. Proof positive that this way of identifying the current version is used for Raspbian, just like it is for all Debian clones.

And shows that those who said you were probably a version behind the new stable were right.

You can either do a clean install of jessie, probably easiest if your system is still almost pristine, or follow the directions for doing the wheezy->jessie upgrade. I have a copy (but didn't keep the URL it lives at) that I can send if you can't find it with a search and nobody posts its URL.

Null-terminated (as opposed to count-controlled) strings are convenient, but are a security nightmare.

THAT is not the root of the problem. The problem goes right back to K & R's decision to use the stack as a terribly fast and efficient way of allocating temporary scratch space. Its wonderful because when you exit a function it vanishes. With no overhead.

Its so dangerous because it is the stack and contains instruction pointer addresses in its remit, and you can overwrite those and take arbitrary code jumps on return...

There are ways around it, but they are overhead, or require a different stack.

If you remember that C is no more than a fast way to write assembler, and gives you the ultimate power to f*ck up totally, you wont make these beginner mistakes.

It is hell:

Definitely do a clean install.

Don't feed the .sigtrolls

And that use of the stack is quite common for many languages, with reasonable security. But allow the "buffer overflows" that can occur without count control and security plummets.

It is also safer if the stack grows upward, so that the return address and other context is not easily trashed by an upward-indexed string copy.

Interesting: it was a straight forward upgrade for me.

OTOH, I suppose backing up at least the contents of /home and /usr/local before doing a clean install and restoring them afterwards is all a good learning process for the many, or so I'm told, PC users who aren't in the habit of making backups.