Is this a bug?

[Matt Johnston]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 10:09:30PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> If I do the following:
> 
> dbclient user at system "sleep 10& echo hello"
> 
> It should return right after printing hello, but it doesn't.  It waits until 
> the child process exits.
> 
> This is a known, longstanding but in OpenSSH on Linux.  It doesn't do this on 
> OpenBSD (the OpenSSH developers insist that it must therefore be a Linux bug, 
> but the Linux developers I talked to wondered what they were drinking, if I 
> recall correctly from when I asked in 2001.)  An xterm won't do this, telnet 
> won't do this...  Just OpenSSH on Linux (not OpenBSD).  And now dropbear.
> 
> Is dropbear intentionally copying this bug?

I've had a quick look, and I think that it is a bug, though
it hasn't been intentionally copied from OpenSSH.  The fix
should be relatively straightfoward, I'll make sure it goes
into the next release. Currently Dropbear won't close the FD
for a shell until the process exits. Instead it should just
be testing for writability of the the FD.

Thanks for the report.

Matt