> trying to do the whatis database in /etc/daily cron job. I know this is a
> FAQ, but what was the resolution?

Stick a bzero() in xmalloc() in misc.c at the obvious place -- that's what
I ended up doing, anyway.  Sed was doing accesses to uninitialized memory.
After this change my sed is once again able to create the whatis database.

Finding the problem involved moving (and porting) the sed and regex sources
to a Sun/SPARC host and running sed under a debugger with a tool called
Purify, which helps me to easily find memory access errors such as these.

BTW, my fix to this bug was only recently reported (as in 10 minutes ago).

- Havard

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