Jim Goes wrote:
Greetings everyone. I am new to this list.
I archive about 20 management-related discussion lists on my web site. I
was
very pleased to discover Mhonarc and I appreciate the work Earl and others
have
put into the program. I am using Mhonarc 1.2.3 under NEXTStep release 3.2,
running Perl 5.003.
I have set up a cron job to archive the discussion lists nightly, and am
having
a consistent problem with segmentation faults. Consulted the FAQ and the
archives for this list but found no joy. As you can see from the attached
log,
Mhonarc seems to crash at random when reading the MIME filter libraries.
The
problem seems random-the program works fine on a particular list archive one
day and not the next. In the same cron job it works fine on some lists and
not
others. I am very perplexed, as there seems to be no pattern.
It seems that others have had seg fault problems, but that they were related
to
reading messages or running an older version of Perl. My problems seem more
connected, at least to this non-programmer, to the Mhonarc code.
Segmentation faults and bus errors are always problem of the perl interpreter.
Perl should never crash, at most die with a graceful error message, in theory
:-)
Therefore I would suggest to install 5.003_11. Chip Salzenberg does a great job
in elimination bugs. Check out CPAN. And look into RECENT.html.
Have you ever tried if mhonarc crashes again if
- mhonarc crached in the cron job
- the mbox (or whatever) has not changed
and you run it again by hand. At least this would give something reproducealbe.
I would appreciate any advice anyone could give me. Many thanks in advance.
--------------
Sorry, no better ideas
Achim
P.S. There are perl bug reports on Next (and maybe other OSs) about 'random'
crashes that are somehow related to "require"ing empty files (not fixed
in 5.003_11 they are still trying to reproduce it).
log excerpt:
[...log of random crashes deleted...]
