Segmentation Fault

abhay180 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I use the following piece of Code to read in a 10,000 entry file and sort the entries in the file in the ascending order. It was working fine for 1000-entries. For 10,000 it exits with a "Segmentation Fault". Any limitations here?

tie @log_array, 'Tie::File', $fname, mode => O_RDWR | O_CREAT;
@log_array = sort  {$a<=>$b} @log_array;
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Re: Segmentation Fault by stevieb (Canon) on Aug 28, 2009 at 06:26 UTC
what happens if you halve it to 5,000 ...when that breaks, what happens when you halve the half that you just halved? :) iow, either way, you are hitting a bug in the data. Half'ing the problem may help. If you find the problem goes away with all of the same data but in segments, use the function to read in the same amount of different data, and try to run the hardware out of memory to find out if exhaustion is the problem. Steve	[reply]
Re^2: Segmentation Fault by abhay180 (Sexton) on Aug 31, 2009 at 06:48 UTC
Thanks for the suggestion. That will take some time for me. Meanwhile is there any other way i can read a file as an array and work on it...just like Tie::File?	[reply]
Re^2: Segmentation Fault by abhay180 (Sexton) on Aug 31, 2009 at 08:15 UTC
Okie. I figured out the exact failure point. It fails when the file contains greater than or equal to 1021 items. It works at 1020. I tried it with multiple sets of data and everytime i see the same result. Seems some weird limit. How can we address this?	[reply]
Re: Segmentation Fault by ikegami (Patriarch) on Aug 31, 2009 at 19:13 UTC
That would indicate a bug in XS code, in perl or in the OS. Tie::File is a Pure Perl module, so it's not the source of the bug. A bug in perl is the next likely suspect. Do you have the same problem with Perl 5.10.1?	[reply]
Re^2: Segmentation Fault by abhay180 (Sexton) on Aug 31, 2009 at 19:31 UTC
I am using perl version 5.8.8 on an x86_64 Linux m/c. Not sure if i'll be able to try it on 5.10.1.	[reply]
Re^3: Segmentation Fault by ikegami (Patriarch) on Aug 31, 2009 at 19:35 UTC
You could try 5.8.9 too. Or rebuilding 5.8.8 with a different compiler or different optimisation settings.	[reply]