Re: [pups] 2.11BSD "make unix" aborts Error 141

Hi - Ah, yes - the 'master reference 2.11BSD system' ('SHEMP' is a virtual pdp-11 running under P11 ;)). Yep, I've been seeing that for years and aside from some kernel hackery to assist in the debugging I haven't done much other than to come up with a workaround. It's the exit status of the assembler. On _some_ modules, the assembler ('as') jumps off into the weeds and executes an 'exit' system call with a non-zero value in R0. 141 is a lower case 'a' as I recall. Now for the interesting part. If you do something like setenv FOOBAR abcdef and run the make the assembler won't "exit 'a". ALSO, if you run the pipeline of the failing command manually, using temp files, it won't fail. Makes it very hard to debug. I'm lazy too (I hear that being lazy is a virtue in programmers ;)) so I just pad the environment with "FOO abc" or something and the make works. The only idea I've come up with to try and track the problem down is a hack to the 'exit' logic in the kernel to create a coredump of a program that exits with 'non-zero' status. Then at least there'd be something to postmortem. An added complication is that the assembler has this nasty habit of using 'jmp' to move around rather than 'jsr' so it's hard to find out where the program was at times. A long time ago I did make a few changes to 'as' to reduce the usage of 'jmp' in an attempt to track this down but then, when even I ran the program under the debugger it never failed - a typical Heisenberg type of bug ;( Good Luck. Steven Schultz