Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!bionet!ames!lll-winken!uunet!sco!rosso
From: rosso@sco.COM (Ross Oliver)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: SCO 286 Xenix spell bombs
Message-ID: <2572@viscous.sco.COM>
Date: 20 Apr 89 20:52:06 GMT
References: <23002@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: uunet!sco!rosso (Ross Oliver)
Organization: SCO Technical Support
Lines: 23

In article <23002@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes:
>In the course of recovering from damage to my XENIX partition caused
>by Norton under MSDOS (the fixed version still can screw up XENIX), I
>reinstalled XENIX.  After I did so, the first time I ran spell, I got
>the results below
>
>table = malloc(0xc848) fails
>sbrk(0) = 0x3868
>spell: cannot initialize hash table
>spell: 5791 Killed

This means that spell has run out of data space.  Spell is small model
program, so it is limited ot 64K of data.  This problem usually
occurs when you have a lot of environment data (i.e. lots of environment
variables, and/or variables containing lots of data), which also
explains why it will happen to one user, but not another.  The quickest
way to check this is to change your TERM environment variable from
containing your entire termcap entry (usually several lines long) to
be "/etc/termcap."  This should free up enough space for spell to work.

Ross Oliver
Technical Support
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.