bad free() ....

[Bill M. <wm...@fo...>]

Hmmm... I've been fighting a problem with ARSperl the last few days and I
THINK I've found something of interest.

Basically, I'm using ARSperl to parse some data extracts from the Corporate
mainframes and blow the data into appropriate schemas in ARS.  I *was* using
ARSperl 1.1.1 with some success, but when processing my largest extract
files, I'd blow up with either a "Bus error" or "Out of Memory!" end or just
a plain core dump with little warning.  Guessing this had something to do
with memory allocation, I jumped when I saw the mention on this list that
ARSperl 1.2 was available and addressed memory allocation problems (in
particular, "bad free()" warnings).  No dice -- same problem.

THEN I recompiled ARSperl to use the "malloc() that comes with Perl" and
discovered: 1) My programs now worked.  2) every call to ars_CreateEntry()
or ars_SetEntry() results in a "bad free() ... ignored ..." warning. :-(

Now before jumping to conclusions, you should also know that I'm running
ARSperl on an HP K-series/HP-UX 10.01 system.  Yep, the one you're not
supposed to be able to run on.  How I got things working was to include the
contents of the ARSperl.tgz file under ext/ARS/ in the perl source tree,
specify ARS to be a static module, hack the generated Makefile to change all
non-comment occurrences of the string "dynamic" to "static" and let 'er rip!

I've been using Perl on HP-UX systems going back to Perl 3.0.44 on the
original HP 800 series with HP-UX 2.1 and since 7.0 had frequently
encountered spurious "bad free()" warnings in the standard Perl distribution
whenever I used "the malloc() that comes with perl" so I haven't even tried
to use it.  This time (Perl 5.002 -released) it seems to work fine EXCEPT in
conjunction with ARSperl.

Joel, ARSperl is a godsend and I hope this feedback can help you make it
perfect, or at least as good as ARS itself ;-)
Bill Meahan - wm...@ma...
Not an official spokesperson for Ford Motor Company