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I mostly agree with you, but I think your argument is wrong. Last month I found a tiny bug in Unix's fgrep program(the bug has no risk). The program implements Aho Corasick algorithm, which hasn't changed much over decades. However, at least when the code was released to 4.4BSD, the bug still existed. It is not much a concern as nowadays most fgrep progroms are just an alias of grep. They do not use the old Unix code anymore. The old Unix code, and much part of FreeBSD, really couldn't meet today's security standard.For example, many text processing programs are vulnerable to DoS attacks when processing well-crafted input strings. I agree with you that in many cases we really don't need to touch the old code. However, it is not just because the algorithm didn't change.



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