php 5.3 seems to crash on scripts when we have register_globals turned on

Question

apache segfaults when we have register_globals turned on with php 5.3. I know we should not do that, and we have it off now, but some of our very old code needs it. Anyone have any hints on what to try/look at to solve this?

thanks

Answer 1

the patchwork approach
You can include some code in the very beginning of the very old script you can use one of the well known register_global compatibility code you can find googling.

An example may be:

// ################# :: Register Globals Compatibility :: #################
$globals_test = @ini_get('register_globals');
if ( isset($globals_test) && empty($globals_test) ) {
// These still need some work :: Cookie|Server|Env are ok now.
if ( !empty($HTTP_GET_VARS) )  { extract($HTTP_GET_VARS, EXTR_SKIP);  }
if ( !empty($HTTP_POST_VARS) ) { extract($HTTP_POST_VARS, EXTR_OVERWRITE); }
define('_GLOBALS', FALSE);
} else {
    define('_GLOBALS', TRUE);
}

The autopatchwork approach

You can add:

php_value   auto_prepend_file  "/path/to/file/with_the_above_code"

to your .htaccess or VirutualHosts section in order to automagically do the job without the need of touch any existing script.

The judicious approach
The best thing of course would be rewrite the old code, as register_globals is a well known evil.

Answer 2

thanks for this. We set it in the .htaccess file for the dir where the old code was, it was luckily contained in one dir. This doesn't seem to crash php, so it is a weird combination of certain code + the setting I'm guessing.