The DOI matches its Crossref record.
An empirical study of the reliability of UNIX utilities
Open accessAbstract
The following section describes the tools we built to test the utilities. These tools include the fuzz (random character) generator, ptyjig (to test interactive utilities), and scripts to automate the testing process. Next, we will describe the tests we performed, giving the types of input we presented to the utilities. Results from the tests will follow along with an analysis of the results, including identification and classification of the program bugs that caused the crashes. The final section presents concluding remarks, including suggestions for avoiding the types of problems detected by our study and some commentary on the bugs we found. We include an Appendix with the user manual pages for fuzz and ptyjig.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
The oracle problem in software testing: A survey
Barr, E. T., Harman, M., McMinn, P., Shahbaz, M., & Yoo, S. (2015) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2014.2372785 · Cited by 1,104
GenProg: A Generic Method for Automatic Software Repair
Le Goues, C., Nguyen, T., Forrest, S., & Weimer, W. (2012) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2011.104 · Cited by 1,085
Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers
Yang, X., Chen, Y., Eide, E., & Regehr, J. (2011) · Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation · doi:10.1145/1993498.1993532 · Cited by 825
EXE: automatically generating inputs of death
Cadar, C., Ganesh, V., Pawlowski, P. M., Dill, D. L., & Engler, D. R. (2006) · Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security · doi:10.1145/1180405.1180445 · Cited by 788
Böhme, M., Pham, V.-T., Nguyen, M.-D., & Roychoudhury, A. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security · doi:10.1145/3133956.3134020 · Cited by 747
Metadata
- Authors
- Miller, B. P., Fredriksen, L., & So, B.
- Venue
- Communications of the ACM
- Published
- 1990-12
- Volume
- 33
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 32-44
- ISSN
- 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7317
- OpenAlex
- W2002934700
- Cited by
- 1,281
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.73
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An empirical study of the reliability of UNIX utilities. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/96267.96279
- The paper
- Miller, B. P., Fredriksen, L., & So, B. (1990). An empirical study of the reliability of UNIX utilities. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/96267.96279
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
