🚀 go-pugleaf

On 19 Jun 1997 00:36:49 GMT, Matthew Gibbins (mgibbins@turing.une.edu.au) wrote:
: 
: Hello fellow slackers,
: 	Anybody else experiencing problems with 
: "Segmentation Fault (Core Dumped)"? 
: 	It is happening with far too much frequency and specificity to be
:  a trivial problem. It so far happens when I execute "more" command; 
:  "useradd -D"; and also when running XF86Setup the core dumps when I select
:  the option to use an already existing XF86Config file that works none
:  the less.
: 	If possible could somebody please direct me to a solution to this
:  problem and possible means of diagnoses. 
: 	Please reply by email to ensure receipt of information thankyou.
: 
	Let me say from the start that I am not a programmer, and most
probably stand corrected on some of this.
	The segmentation fault is caused by the program that is running, a
likely cause being the program writing to memory that it has not been
allocated. The program gets yelled at by the OS (memory manager), shits
itself and takes a dump (I'm sure there is a pun there somewhere). The
"core dump" is what is in memory at the time and in some non-human
readable from. Hence debuggers, these tricky little fellows "read" the
core, and tell you where (hopefully) things went wrong. You (as a
programmer) can then go but to your code and fix things up.
	All very good and well in theory, but what does the average user
do about all this?  Make a bug report. This involves reproducing the seg.
fault (once or twice will do) and documenting everything, so that someone
else (Eg. the programmer) can recreate it. He does that and fixes
(hopefully) the code and we all live happily ever after.
	Why do bugs like this get through into distributed software? There
is so many flavor of unix and platforms to run it on that a developer can
not test ever aspect of every piece of code on every combination. Thats
why it is up to you to report bugs.
	Final note: not confuse bugs with undocumented features (when the
program doesn't do what you expect.) And don't forget to rm -f core, they
can be big.1

Brad.
-- 
Bradley Purton.				purton@minyos.its.rmit.edu.au
Human Biology Honours.                  http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~purton
RMIT. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.   Phone (BH) (+61 03 9468) 2458
    "Such is life." -Ned Kelly.	              (mobile) 018 371 917