Xref: utzoo comp.lang.perl:719 comp.sys.celerity:72 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!usc!samsung!think!yale!cmcl2!lanl!beta.lanl.gov!scp From: scp@acl.lanl.gov (Stephen C. Pope) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl,comp.sys.celerity Subject: Perl PL14 woes on FPS500 Message-ID: Date: 15 Mar 90 00:21:25 GMT Sender: news@lanl.gov Distribution: comp Organization: Advanced Computing Lab, LANL, NM Lines: 26 After bringing my perl up to PL14 and working all day on an old script (esp. making use of the new (LIST)[SLICE] trick), I'm finding some very irregular, non-deterministic behavoir that I'm loath to debug: I'm getting spurious complaints from Larry's malloc that I've got a ``bad free() ignored''; it happens pretty randomly and in no repeatable (that *I* can figure...) fashion but always in statements involving arrays. Also, I have a subroutine which does a system "cd /etc/yp; make". I'm doing nothing to set or alter the environment or path, but about 75% of the time when this subroutine is invoked from one point in the program, various things like ``makedbm'' spawned by the ``make'' die a horrible and unexplained death, but this happens only about 5% of the time when the subroutine is invoked from another point; again, very stochastic... Thing is, (cd /etc/yp; make) from the command line always works 110% of the time. I'm not *sure* I can blaim this on perl, but I'm kinda suspicious... Anyone on the same or similar system seen such behavoir? Anything I might be doing wrong to provoke the malloc free() problems? Any tips on tracking this down? stephen pope advanced computing lab, lanl scp@acl.lanl.gov