syslog(3) doesn't cover openlog()'s ident being NULL

[Ralph Corderoy]

Ubuntu 9.04, manpages-dev 3.15-1.

syslog(3) documents openlog(ident, option, facility). It doesn't describe what happens if openlog is passed NULL as an ident. It does say that syslog itself will do this if syslog is called without openlog having been called previously. So, either I can pass NULL to openlog myself, or syslog may do so, but what will that do in terms of the data logged?

Empirically, it seems the basename of argv[0] will be used. This should be documented.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. I have classified this bug as a bug in manpages.

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport, either via the appropriate application's "Help -> Report a Problem" menu or using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Ralph Corderoy (ralph-inputplus)]

Sorry for not identifying the package. I normally do. As you see, I specified the version of the manpages-dev package. Thanks for correcting. Now all it needs is for someone to confirm it! :-)

[Michael Kerrisk (mtk-manpages)]

Upstream man-pages-3.41 patches as follows:

--- a/man3/syslog.3
+++ b/man3/syslog.3
@@ -66,6 +66,13 @@ opens a connection to the system logger for a program.
 The string pointed to by
 .I ident
 is prepended to every message, and is typically set to the program name.
+If
+.I ident
+is NULL, the program name is used.
+(POSIX.1-2008 does not specify the behavior when
+.I ident
+is NULL.)
+
 The
 .I option
 argument specifies flags which control the operation of

[Matt Fischer (mfisch)]

This is fixed in Raring (13.04)