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From: falk@peregrine.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sources
Subject: Re: A Usenet article generator
Message-ID: <13630@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 19-Feb-87 13:15:10 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.13630
Posted: Thu Feb 19 13:15:10 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Feb-87 22:07:54 EST
References: <906@epimass.UUCP> <4521@curly.ucla-cs.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: falk@sun.UUCP (Ed Falk)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 33

>In article <906@epimass.UUCP> jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck) writes:
>>I created a bit of a stir with this program in December 1986 when I
>>used an earlier version of it to simulate a certain well-known net
>>personality (Hi Laura!).  It digests Usenet articles and spits out
>>other articles with similar characteristics.
>
>Well, I compiled and run it, but at the end of producing its amusing
>output, it constantly gives "Segmentation fault - core dumped". This
>is on a VAX running 4.3BSD.
>
>Stuart

This happened to me on a Sun.  I tracked it down to these few lines:

		  tp = p->scnod->text2;
	  /* Check for "end of story" */
		  if (tp == NULL)
		      break;

Sometimes "p->scnod" is null, so you get a seg fault.  I added the
line:

		if(tp->scnod  ==  NULL)
		  break ;

That prevented the core dumps, but the program always gives me the
exact same output.  I think the random number generator is being
reinitialized to the same thing one each loop.


		-ed falk, sun microsystems
		 sun!falk, falk@sun.com
terrorist, cryptography, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode, NSA, CIA, NRO.