Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site mnetor.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcs!mnetor!clewis
From: clewis@mnetor.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: Bug in expire.c that affects Pyramids (and probably some others).
Message-ID: <843@mnetor.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-May-85 15:17:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: mnetor.843
Posted: Tue May 21 15:17:34 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 21-May-85 16:45:45 EDT
Organization: Computer X (CANADA) Ltd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 21

On "news 2.10.2" after a news system blowup (multiple concurrent expires) 
totally trashed our active and history file (zero contents) we attempted
to rebuild active and history via "expire -r".  There was an immediate
core dump.  Looking through the source I discovered that there was
the following declaration in expire.c fcn. "main":

	DIR *ngdirp;

And, later, there was a test to see if it was non-null - if it was,
a "closedir" was issued on it.  Apparently we got bitten by the
"Pyramid-really-initializes-local-variables-to-garbage" characteristic.
I thought VAXen BSD's did this too, but I guess not in this case.
Anyhow, the fix that worked was:

	DIR *ngdirp = (DIR *) NULL;

"expire -r" worked fine from then on.
-- 
Chris Lewis,
UUCP: {allegra, linus, ihnp4}!utzoo!mnetor!clewis
BELL: (416)-475-8980 ext. 321