[ast-developers] core dump (crash) on KSH 2014-12-24

[David A.D. Morano, PE, PhD]

Hello,

I just compiled AST-OPEN 2014-12-24 and tried out the new KSH.
Platform is "sol8.sun4".

For KSH 2014-12-24 (latest beta?) it core dumps readily and
quickly on certain text input in interactive mode.

Scenario:

a> ksh
$ #nn <- literal three characters "#nn"
<instant core dump)

After typing a '#' character, almost any combination of two
characters will cause a core dump.

A GDB backtrace on the core file yields:

#0 ed_emacsread()
#1 slowread()
#2 sfrd()


In a related matter:

The same thing happens on the MacOS-X platform (Darwin 14.3.0 -- the
latest stable version). There (on MacOS-X) it occurs on KSH
version '93u 2011-02-08'.

But no core dumps occur under this scenario on the MacOS-X version
of KSH '93u+ 2012-08-01' -- the version shipped with the OS.

So at least this problem appears to have been fixed already for
the latest MacOX-X release (by either you or perhaps by the Apple
people).

In other KSH matters:

There appears to be many run-time bugs in the latest KSH. Maybe some
are new but many seem to be old bugs that are just occurring more
frequently for some reason. The most severe (I think) of these
is for KSH to think that an entered command is falsely a function
and then complain that it got an "exec format error" when trying to
execute the entered command. It also puts out something that seems
to indicate that KSH tries to read the binary program as a function
definition and then failing on that as well.

I will post more on this and other run-time errors and core dumps
as I have some time to investigate them (which sadly is not much).

But -- oddly enough -- this version of KSH (in AST 2014-12-24 and KSH
'93v- 2014-12-24') actually appears to have less important failures
than some of the older KSHs over the last several years (from 2011).
So thanks very much for fixing the many bugs over the last few years.

I will try to compile on the latest MacOS-X perhaps when some of the
remaining CLANG compilation problems are worked out. Maybe fixing
some of the CLANG problems will fix some compilation problems across
other platforms -- let us hope! :-)

In general -- great job!

Thanks again,

----

David A. Morano, PE, PhD
***@computer.org

[Terrence J. Doyle]

Post by David A.D. Morano, PE, PhD
I just compiled AST-OPEN 2014-12-24 and tried out the new KSH.
Platform is "sol8.sun4".
... The most severe (I think) of these
is for KSH to think that an entered command is falsely a function
and then complain that it got an "exec format error" when trying to
execute the entered command. It also puts out something that seems
to indicate that KSH tries to read the binary program as a function
definition and then failing on that as well.

Check your FPATH. You will get that error when the command is a binary
and is in an FPATH directory. FPATH is meant strictly for directories of
files that contain shell functions. The "Exec format error" comes when
ksh tries to . (source) the binary file and sees no shell function.

Terrence Doyle

Post by David A.D. Morano, PE, PhD
...
David A. Morano, PE, PhD
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