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From: afc@shibaya.lonestar.org (Augustine Cano)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.3b1
Subject: Make /bin/sort dump core, try this...
Message-ID: <1991Jun23.042423.20470@shibaya.lonestar.org>
Date: 23 Jun 91 04:24:23 GMT
Organization: Multidisciplinary Designs Unlimited
Lines: 35

The following lines come from the 'ngsizes' script, by Chip Rosenthal,
that displays /usr/spool/news/* directory usage:

ACTIVE=/usr/lib/news/active
sed -e 's/[ 	].*//' -e '/^$/d' $ACTIVE | sort -u > $TMP.ngs

It turns out that everything works as expected, except "sort -u".  Even
that used to work fine until a few days ago.  I wonder if the active
file has grown past a critical point or if a specific sequence of lines
in my active file is the culprit.

wc /usr/lib/news/active shows 768 newsgroups:
    768   3072  31131 /usr/lib/news/active

I tend to believe the former since running the above sed script and sorting
its output without the -u option works fine, however, running 'sort -u' on
the previously sorted output of the sed script dumps core.

Can somebody duplicate this problem? or is *my* active file responsible?

This is the output of 'sum /bin/sort' (from 3.51.)
18858 9 /bin/sort

And this is what sdb has to say.  Anybody with source wanna take a look?

Core file 'core' Memory Fault (11) at 
Warning: '/bin/sort` has no symbols
: address 0x8135a
>

I suppose it's time to get GNU sort... 

-- 
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