My VAXen are not sufficiently set up to help with most of this, but I can contribute one remark (which is actually MI):I'm not quite sure how to get gdb to disassemble the faulting instruction% gdb awk awk.core ...blather... (gdb) x/i $pc
Thank you... I thought that was the syntax, too, but this is what I get: Core was generated by `awk'. Program terminated with signal 4, Illegal instruction. #0 0x80196183 in ?? () (gdb) x/i $pc 0x80196183: Cannot access memory at address 0x80196183 Not sure what to do from here... John