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From: david@linus.UUCP (David M. Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: /bin/mail gets SIGILL
Message-ID: <13287@felix.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 12:08:09 EST
Article-I.D.: felix.13287
Posted: Wed Nov 18 12:08:09 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 08:27:50 EST
Sender: chuck@felix.UUCP
Reply-To: david@linus.UUCP (David M. Watson)
Organization: Cognition, Inc., Billerica, MA
Lines: 28
Approved: zemon@felix.UUCP

Reply-Path:




We have suddenly started to see a problem with /bin/mail in Ultrix 2.0.  All
mail sent to me from a certain redistribution list (urusei-yatsura@panda.com
-- I just joined it the other day) causes /bin/mail to do the following:

- Receive the mail from sendmail.  The "From:" line is quite long,
	usually about 110 characters, but the buffer used by /bin/mail has
	plenty of room for this.

- Deliver the mail to my spool file, no problems so far.

- Receive a SIGILL -- who knows why?  Difficult to debug too.

- Go to the signal catcher, which cleans up and does a longjmp() back to
	main().

- Hang inside the longjmp, forever using all it can get of the CPU.

We have the source and I expect to be able to locate and fix this myself, so
this is really a warning, not a plea for help. 

Has everyone seen a problem like this with /bin/mail?  I think it may be
ULTRIX-specific because DEC made changes to /bin/mail for locking files
in the presence of NFS recently.  The funny thing is that I can't get
it to behave badly for any mail message not sent from urusei-yatsura.

			-D.