buffer overflow

programming What happens when you try to store more data in

a buffer than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatch

in the processing rates of the producing and consuming

processes (see overrun and firehose syndrome), or because

the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must

accumulate before a piece of it can be processed. For

example, in a text-processing tool that crunches a line at a

time, a short line buffer can result in lossage as input

from a long line overflows the buffer and overwrites data

beyond it. Good defensive programming would check for

overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the

buffer is full.

See also spam, overrun screw.

[Jargon File]

(1996-05-13)