debugging possible memory crash?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a ~1.5MB data file which is simply dumped to screen using the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

eval {
    die 'insufficient arguments' unless @ARGV;
    open(IN, $ARGV[0]) or die "unable to open '$ARGV[0]'";
    while (<IN>) {
        printf "%4d:\t%s", $., $_;
    }
    close IN;
};
if ($@) {
    print "error:\t$@";
}
[download]

If I run this in an xterm specifying the data's filename as an argument, the script runs & terminates the xterm. When I run this script at the console it runs to completion as expected; my debugger knowledge is weak, but it appears to run fine there too. What should I be looking for in the debugger in order to determine the root cause? Thanks for any insight which can be shared.

Comment on debugging possible memory crash? Download Code

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Re: debugging possible memory crash? by varian (Chaplain) on Jun 11, 2007 at 06:40 UTC
Indead not really a Perl issue. This is documented xterm behavior, it is supposed to exit as soon as the program it has started has completed. So instead of: `xterm -e 'perl xx.pl'` [download] specify an extra xterm option to keep the window open after the Perl program has finished: `xterm -hold -e 'perl xx.pl'` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: debugging possible memory crash? by Anonymous Monk on Jun 11, 2007 at 06:45 UTC
I'm running a shell within the xterm. Executing the Perl script takes down both the shell & xterm. This is expected behaviour? I would think I should be returning to the shell...	[reply]
Re^3: debugging possible memory crash? by Anonymous Monk on Jun 11, 2007 at 09:00 UTC
once perl exits, xterm does what xterm want	[reply]
Re: debugging possible memory crash? by cdarke (Prior) on Jun 11, 2007 at 08:30 UTC
There might be some binary data in the file which is confusing your xterm, is it pure text?	[reply]
Re^2: debugging possible memory crash? by derby (Abbot) on Jun 11, 2007 at 14:21 UTC
I would agree with cdarke. Possibly some non-ASCII characters (UTF-8?) are being output and your xterm cannot handle it -- but I haven't seen that in quite some time. What system are you running and what version of xterm do you have? -derby	[reply]
Re^3: debugging possible memory crash? by Anonymous Monk on Jun 11, 2007 at 14:56 UTC
Actually, I'm running aterm 0.4.2p1 on OpenBSD 4.1. Do you know how I would check to see if characters are UTF-8?	[reply]
Re^4: debugging possible memory crash? by cdarke (Prior) on Jun 11, 2007 at 15:29 UTC
Re: debugging possible memory crash? by TOD (Friar) on Jun 11, 2007 at 05:53 UTC
that must not be a perl problem, nor one of the system memory. i assume it's the xterm configuration. -------------------------------- masses are the opiate for religion.	[reply]