BitchX is a free

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuabl ...

("If you're already using Linux, then you have your choice of several (IRC) clients. BitchX is a popular one.") and has been considered to be the most popular

ircII ircII (pronounced ''i-r-c-two'' or ''irk-two'', and sometimes referred to as ''IRC client, second edition'') is a free, open-source Unix IRC and ICB client written in C. Initially released in the late 1980s, it is the oldest IRC client still m ...

-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a

script Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

for the IrcII chat client. It was converted to a program in its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C and is a TUI application utilizing

ncurses ncurses (new curses) is a programming library providing an application programming interface (API) that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces (TUI) in a terminal-independent manner. It is a toolkit for developing "GUI-like" ...

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems, and is distributed under a

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

. It is originally based on ircII-EPIC and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

, multiple servers and SSL and a subset of

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

(characters contained in

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

) with an

unofficial patch An unofficial patch is a patch for a piece of software, created by a third party such as a user community without the involvement of the original developer. Similar to an ordinary patch, it alleviates bugs or shortcomings. Unofficial patches do no ...

. BitchX has frequently been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.Review:BitchX (Amiga)
, IRCreviews.org, Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is favoured by many more experienced IRC users")A Day in the Life of #Apache
, OSDir.com (March 25, 2005), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("XChat, mIRC, and bitchx are several popular clients")How to use IRC guide
Overclockersclub.com (Dec. 4, 2006), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("There are many different clients available, some of the more popular ones include BitchX, XChat, Trillian, BeserIRC, Klient ....")What about P2P on *nix?
Broadbandreports.com (Sept. 13, 2002), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("There are several IRC clients for Linux. Among the best are X-Chat and BitchX.")BitchX Configuration Guide
Linuxhelp.net (last updated Sept. 19, 2003), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is one of the most popular IRC Client available today for *nix systems.") The latest official release is version 1.2 BitchX does not yet support Unicode.

Security

It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability. The previous version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine
CVE-2007-3360CVE-2007-4584
. On April 26, 2009,

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions ...

removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues. The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.

References

External links

* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bitchx Unix Internet Relay Chat clients Free Internet Relay Chat clients Internet Relay Chat clients Free software programmed in C

Security

See also

References

External links