nelson@iris.ucdavis.edu (Pat Nelson) (01/18/90)
I have received a request for help from one of the faculty here at UC Davis. We have talked to Berkeley and AT+T for help and they suggested we send a request to the net for help. Any suggestions? Copy of the request below. Please respond directly via email to internet address nelson@iris.ucdavis.edu |_______________________________________________________________________ | |I'm having problems with deroff (used as part of spell). It dumps |core on our DEC 8600 running Ultrix-32 V3.1 (Rev. 9) System #3: | |The problem is that deroff interprets the .PS/.PE (which I had defined |as my own -me macros) as pic output and tries to gobble the pic |output. I didn't trace exactly how it dumps core. (I suspect that the |\e\| is part of the problem.) Note that gobbling pic input is not |documented in any man page I have seen. | |I've attached a sample, which is fairly short; the |problem is very sensitive (e.g., if I remove a plain text line, |deroff works fine). | |The fix is to use yet another undocumented feature: e.g., deroff -me |works fine. Except of course, that needs to be specified in the spell |script. | |Are there any patches to the code and man pages that we |should know about so we dont have to use an undocumented fix? | |Thanks. ------------------------------cut here---------------------------- |In addition, character literals |.PS | "here is a \e\|" in the middle" |.PE |The string type has one, binary operator defined on it. |String concatenation, |represented by |\&|, |combines its two operand strings into a new string. |The pre-defined function maxlength(s) |returns the maximum number of characters in string s. |For either function, |s can be a variable or an arbitrary string expression. |The following table gives some examples of these pre-defined |functions assuming x is a string variable declared string[20] |and its current value is "oscar". |.(b |.TS |l l l. |expr length(expr) maxlength(expr) |_ _ _ |"abc" || x 8 8 |.TE |.)b |Note that |the values of length and maxlength are the same |for an expression that contains more than just a single variable. ___________________________________________________________________