Why am I crashing my system?

[Brain in Neutral]

> Now the ugly part of the above scenario.  The remote command has
> finished, it's just that the local parent is hung up waiting to receive
> the rest of the output.  Ok, fine, says I, I'll just ^C it.  That's
> supposed to send a signal into the socket.  Of course, that socket goes
> nowhere.  The system dies with a segmentation violation.  This does not
> seem friendly to me.  Why does it occur?  Alternatively, how do I tell
> that I'd better not write into that socket?

My problem seems to be fixed by making sure that the client socket has
keepalive and linger turned on.  Apparently a socket was getting shut
down too early on one end and writing something into it from the other
end did nasty things.  I am still of the opinion that it would be more
reasonable for the system to report an error in this case than to
panic and crash, however.

Paul DuBois
dubois at primate.wisc.edu