Thanks for investigating this problem, and for saving the file to reproduce it. The corruption of the .Xauthority file seems to consist just of a bunch of extra null bytes at the front. A series of 10 null bytes represents an authority record for an Internet connected display whose address is the empty string (rather than a 4-byte IP address), which is what explains xauth's "Illegal Address:" message. Because the number of null bytes was a multiple of 10, xauth and Xlib could still read the correct data at the end.
I believe I've been able to fix this problem in version 0.55 (now on CPAN). I fixed an underlying problem with a read() call that was always treating a read of 0 bytes as a failure, even when that was the length the code had asked for, and also added code that recognizes this particular kind of corrupt file and prints a better error message. -- Stephen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
