There are lots of places where a numeric argument of an argument string
gets extraced as signed long value and then assigned to an unsigned long
variable. If the value in the string was negative, it would not be
detected as invalid (and replaced by the default value), but become a
positive bogus value.
With this patch, numeric values which are supposed to be unsigned get
extracted with the 'ulong_value()' function, which returns the default
value for negative numbers.
Fixes#1472
0fd53c7fe4