C and AWK questions

[bobr]

We would appreciate information from anyone who has found an answer to the 
following problems: 

We are searching for debugging techniques to track down malloc/realloc 
aborts.  Occasionally, our programs get memory faults within the stdio's 
_flsbuf() subroutine.  Does anyone have hints on tracking down the types of 
things that would clobber the malloc buffers?  

Does anyone have a routine which performs the same expansion on its 
argument as does the Bourne shell?  That is, would expand [], ?, *, [!] 
into appropriate file names?  

Does anyone know of a way to invoke a program from within AWK, passing it 
one or more awk variables, and then trapping its output into another awk 
variable?  Does anyone know how to get input from multiple files 
simultaneously from within an awk program?  

We have a file which contains lines which are duplicates.  We want to be
able to get only one occurance of these lines.  Is there a way to tell
one of the versions of grep to find the pattern and obtain only the
first (or last) hit found?

Thanks in advance,

     Bob Richards (...cbosgd!chemabs!bobr)
     Chemical Abstracts Service
     (614) 421-3600 X2486