Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 12/12] tree-wide: convert open calls to remove spaces to skip_spaces() lib function

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2009 13:47:22 -0500

On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 01:16:20PM -0200, André Goddard Rosa wrote:
> Makes use of skip_spaces() defined in lib/string.c for removing leading
> spaces from strings all over the tree.
> 
> Also, while at it, if we see (*str && isspace(*str)), we can be sure to
> remove the first condition (*str) as the second one (isspace(*str)) also
> evaluates to 0 whenever *str == 0, making it redundant. In other words,
> "a char equals zero is never a space".

There are a number of places that have the pattern of skipping
whitespace, calling simpler_strtoul(), and then skipping whitespace
afterwards.  And thinkpad_acpi.c and fs/ext4/super.c both have an
indentical function, parse_strotul(), which basically does this plus
doing actual error checking (a number of callers of simple_strtoul
aren't checking to see if the user passed in a valid number or not,
boo.)

I would suggest that we should lift parse_strtoul() into lib/, both to
save a bit of code, as well as encouraging people to do proper input
validation, while we are doing this tree-wide cleanup.

						- Ted