Hi Blake, > I passed an errant file to groff through java and the process is > hanging.
I've never used Java, but I expect it's waiting for you to process some of the large amount of output from the program to stderr before it proceeds to read more. This blocks tbl(1) when it tries to write to stderr. Look into what those Java routines are doing with the command's stdout and stderr and whether there are any default buffer sizes being exceeded by stderr. Here, tbl prints 265,419 B to stderr, which is suspiciously a bit over 256 KiB. -- Cheers, Ralph.
