unexplained cores after compiles

Robert E. Stampfli res at cbnews.ATT.COM
Tue Feb 14 07:40:46 AEST 1989


I have noticed that occasionally I will get a core dump immediately after
invoking a program on the Unix-PC, usually upon trying to run it after
it has just finished compiling.  Simply reinvoking the program without
any changes results in it running fine.  This can not be attributed to a
hardware glitch, as I have seen this on at least three machines I have access
to.  Each has different disks, memory configuration, etc.  They were,
however, all running version 3.5 of the Unix-PC operating system. 

Let me stress that this is a rare occurrance -- I have only seen it about
six times, and I do a lot of compiling and testing on the Unix-PC.
Examination of the cores show nothing useful -- infact, it is sometimes hard
to explain how the code could possibly have faulted given the registers taken
from the core file.

I am curious: has anyone else experienced this?  If so, what version of
Unix were you running?  How often does it bite you?  I have a few pet
hypotheses but really no way to verify them.  Anyway, I am mainly curious if
others have observed this, too.

Rob Stampfli
att!cbnews!res (work)
osu-cis!n8emr!kd8wk!res (home)



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