From: jim@n5ial.mythical.com (Jim Graham) Subject: Mystery core dumps and odd gtar behavior Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 22:07:07 GMT
Greetings, all. I've got yet another question for the group. Actually,
as long as I'm posting anyways, I've got two questions. :-)
First, and most important, the issue of mystery core dumps. Lately, for
no readily apparent reason, I get core dumps sometimes when programs exit
normally (due to segmentation fault). These sometimes happen when I use
^C to break out of something (hard to reproduce---the next time I do this,
it doesn't usually segfault, but instead exits normally). I've also just
managed to get one that I could reproduce, too. I had two files, each of
which is something like 700 lines long, and I did the following:
diff test3.out test2.out | less
Now, if I quit ('q') after viewing the entire set of diffs, no problem.
But if I quit after only viewing part of the diffs, I get the notorious
(and very much despised) ``Segmentation fault (core dumped)'' back in my
face.
Has anyone seen this before? Does anyone have any idea why this has
suddenly started to happen? Could this be connected in some way to the
SIGSEGVs that I sometimes get (yeah, I'm reaching here...I don't know
what else to look at). This has only started to happen very recently.
Btw, Linus, if you're reading this....this started right around the same
time as I added the HD_DELAY in the kernel. Could this somehow be part
of the cause?
The second question deals with GNU tar version 1.11.1. I've tried sending
this to the address listed in the README, but with absolutely no response
of any kind. I'm trying to get gtar to work in such a way that when I
create a tar archive, and then extract it again, what I extract looks
***EXACTLY*** like what I started with---file ownership, directory
ownership, permissions, setuid/setgid (if running as root), etc., all
exactly the same. As it is now, I've been able to do everything above
except for directory ownership. No matter what, the directories end up
being owned by whoever runs gtar to extract the files.
Does anyone know how to get this last bit fixed? Now, before anyone says
to RTFM, let me just point out that I'd love to (and I've tried to find
docs for older versions with no luck)...but the README for gtar version
1.11.1 just says that the docs were deliberately left out of the
distribution since they weren't complete. Therefore, the ``documentation''
is `gtar --help`, and that isn't worth much in this case....
Suggestions? Comments? Thanks,
--jim
PS: config is: 20 MHz 386 w/ 4 Meg RAM,
kernel: 0.99 PL6
minix fs (will probably be ext2fs *VERY* soon)