smith@NRL-AIC.ARPA (Russ Smith) (03/06/85)
The following script shows a possible bug with "spell" under 4.2 BSD
on a VAX-11/780. The spell input has been reduced to the apparent
minimum needed to reproduce the error. The ".PS" is needed, other
".XX" don't appear to cause a problem. This is a reduction from the
actual text which caused the problem.
===================================================================
Script started on Wed Mar 6 09:28:52 1985
% cat sp
.PS
"A'
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
12345678901234567890123456789
% spell sp
/usr/bin/spell: 14285 Bus error - core dumped
% exit
==================================================================
The input text consists of the above visual text appended with a single
newline per line...no blanks at the end of lines. The line causing the
problem is the second, where thru a typo a single quote (') was used
instead of a double quote ("). The actual ".PS" stuff was input to the
"pic" processor and originally was surrounded with other nroff commands
and text. The ' instead of " was the only typo present in the original
text.
Russ <Smith@nrl-aic>
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligencejaap@mcvax.UUCP (Jaap Akkerhuis) (03/12/85)
The core dumped by spell is from deroff, which tries to rip the troff info from the input. It gets easily confused and dumps core every now and then. The fix is to throw deroff away and maybe replace is by a sed srcipt or have the troff commands stored in the wordlist as allowed words. jaap, mcvax!jaap