Dear PAR people,
Lately we've run into a problem with some pp-packaged scripts
failing instantly on some systems, under some circumstances.
We see the problem on AIX and IRIX. Since you don't claim to
support IRIX, I have created a minimal demo of it on AIX.
In particular, the error message indicates failure in perl's
BEGIN phase when a) the user's env size (i.e., env | wc) is
somewhat large, and b) the pp command line has non-trivial
arguments.
I demonstrate the problem on AIX with a one-line script --
pp -o demo -e 'print "Hello\n"'
Right after packaging, these commands all work fine --
demo -help
demo -h
demo
Each simply prints "Hello", as expected.
Then I start increasing my env size, retrying the 'demo -help'
command as I go, like so --
export AAA=aaaaaaaa
export AAA=$AAA:$AAA
demo -help
export AAA=$AAA:$AAA
demo -help
export AAA=$AAA:$AAA
demo -help
[...]
Eventually, the execution fails, like this --
demo: execution of demo failed - aborting with -1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 758.
I have no idea which file's line 758 is being talked about
here.
As soon as I hit that failure, without changing env size, I
observe that either of these commands --
demo -h
demo
still runs correctly.
FWIW, on the AIX system where I see this, the failure kicks in
when my env size gets up around 11 KB. The command 'lsattr -E
-l sys0' says that ncargs (ARG/ENV list size) is set to 24 KB,
so it's failing when I'm close to half my limit.
By the way, I'm no system guru, much less an AIX guru. I think
ncargs is the relevant parameter, but I could be wrong.
Remember some months back when I and my colleague Tom Pollard
reported env/arg corruption with very short command-line args?
This new behavior seems to be the exact inverse, though perhaps
that's just a coincidence.
Further details: AIX 5.2 + PAR 0.80_99 + perl 5.8.1 is one
combination where I demonstrate the above.
Any idea what the problem is? Can it be fixed easily? Is there
an obvious workaround? Is it a known problem which is fixed
in more recent releases?
I don't have root privilege, but I am willing to try other
experiments which don't require it.
-- Mark Reboul
--
Mark Reboul Schrodinger, LLC
Software Developer 120 West 45th Street, 32nd floor
[EMAIL PROTECTED] New York, NY 10036
646-366-9555 x112 http://www.schrodinger.com
