malloc bug ?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1991Mar20.142604.29925 at fmrco> harold at fmrco (Harold Naparst) writes:
>I have a program which is bombing with a SEGV in a call to malloc.
>I am curious as to what could be causing this.

The usual cause is that the application has corrupted some of the
free-space arena, damaging the bookkeeping information (such as
pointers in a linked list) that the malloc()/free() implementation
relies on to keep track of free space.  Then later, when malloc()
is looking for free space, it gets confused by the damaged
information and falls off the deep end.