Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs
Subject: Re: Sun4os4 /bin/sh dumps core. (wa
Message-ID: <2441@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 13 Sep 89 16:14:09 GMT
References: <2439@auspex.auspex.com> <68400003@sts>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 60

>What bug that causes "/bin/sh" to drop core?  In the first quoted
>article by you, you said that "/bin/sh" wasn't dropping core at all.
>Have you found out that it is now?

No.  The article that started this off, <550@caldwr.UUCP>, noted a bug
that caused "perl" to drop core:

	...

	I'm running SunOS 4.0.1 on a Sun 4/260.  Got perl 3.0 (beta),
	ran configure, make depend, make, then make test.  On the
	latter it gives the message:

	sh: 24615 Memory fault - core dumped

	...

A followup article, <FLEE.89Sep7225002@shire.cs.psu.edu>, claimed,
incorrectly, that this was "actually a problem with SunOS 4.0 in
general", and cited an unrelated bug that caused the shell to drop core:

	Actually, a problem with SunOS 4.0 in general--I suspect dynamic
	libraries.  The following may or may not cause a coredump:
		(in csh)
		% set x=x
		% while (1)
		? sh -c 'a='$x'`pwd` echo -n .'		# note the quoting!
		? set x=x$x
		? end

	After a couple hundred dots, you may or may not get a series of
		sh: Memory fault - core dumped

In the first quoted article by me, <2431@auspex.auspex.com>, I was
responding to article <2256@hydra.Helsinki.FI>, in which the author
claimed that

	Probably not so.  I have perl 3.0-beta running on Sun 3's (under
	SunOS 4.0.3) but it (or actually sh) dumps core on my Sun 4/260
	(also SunOS 4.0.3) when I try 'make test'.  Either this is a
	specific Sun 4 problem or I have made some mistake while running
	Configure. 

The error message may have said "sh: ... - core dumped", but this
definitely does not mean that it was necessarily the shell that dumped
core (I just tried running "sh -c a.out" where "a.out" was a program
that called "abort()" and thus dumped core, and 1) the error message had
"sh:" in front of it and 2) it was "a.out", not the shell, that dumped
core).  When I ran "make test" on a 4/280 here running 4.0.1, "perl"
dropped core - NOT the shell.

In the article to which you're replying, <2439@auspex.auspex.com>, "The
bug that causes '/bin/sh' to drop core" is the one described in
<FLEE.89Sep7225002@shire.cs.psu.edu>, the article mentioned above.

In short, in the first quoted article, I said that "/bin/sh" wasn't
dropping core when "make test" is run for "perl" on a Sun-4.  I didn't
say it wasn't dropping core when you ran the sequence described in
<FLEE.89Sep7225002@shire.cs.psu.edu>, but that's a different sequence
from the one that causes "perl" to drop core.