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From: gary@proa.sv.dg.com (Gary Bridgewater)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: More NNTP/NN fails to post
Message-ID: <1990Dec23.065101.6967@proa.sv.dg.com>
Date: 23 Dec 90 06:51:01 GMT
References: <1990Dec22.024405.28519@supernet.haus.com>
Organization: Data General SDD, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 30

In article <1990Dec22.024405.28519@supernet.haus.com> cluther@supernet.haus.com (Clay Luther) writes:
>I have tracked the NN->NNTP posting problem down to the following error, 
>I assume emitted by the NNTP server:
>
>spawn: execle(/usr/lib/news/inews)/usr/lib/news/inews: Exec format error

Presumably your execle call is as picky as ours.  A couple of things can
happen in that execle: 1) the "flag" argument can actually be NULL prematurely
ending the argv's and killing "myenviron" and/or 2) the "myenviron" pointer
can be NULL.
On my system, #2 gave me your message.
Presumably this line in server/spawn.c
		execle(path, name, flag, (char *) NULL, myenviron);
should be changed to something like
		if ( flag )
		    if ( myenviron )
			execle(path, name, flag, (char *) NULL, myenviron);
		    else
			execl(path, name, flag, (char *) NULL);
		else
		    if ( myenviron )
			execle(path, name, (char *) NULL, myenviron);
		    else
			execl(path, name, (char *) NULL);


Or at least that is the result of a few hours experimentation on my system.
-- 
Gary Bridgewater, Data General Corporation, Sunnyvale California
gary@sv.dg.com or {amdahl,aeras,amdcad}!dgcad!gary
C++ - it's the right thing to do.