Tcl Source Code

This occurs in tcl8.5.6, in porting to UWIN running on a i686 platform. The expected behavior is tclsh should not core dump when an exec'd command exits with a signal.

When a process started by the exec command terminates with a signal, tcl core dumps by referencing the wait status as a pointer to a string. 
The problem code is in generic/tclPipe.c:TclCleanupChildren line 331 
  Tcl_AppendResult(interp, "child killed: ", p, " waitstatus x%x\n", waitStatus, NULL);

I've corrected the problem by changing the above code to the following:

sprintf(msg2, "x%4.4x\n", waitStatus);
Tcl_AppendResult(interp, "child killed: ", p, "waitstatus ", msg2, NULL);

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More questions.
Looking at the CVS head of Tcl 8.5, file generic/tclPipe.c, rev 1.19) I do not find the code you are refering too.

Grepping through the cvs heads of 8.[456] the phrase 'waitstatus x' is nowhere found.
Goinf for 'child killed:' I find
andreask@gila:~/activetcl/dbn/night> grep -rn 'child killed:' ~/lsf/tcl-8.[456]
/home/andreask/lsf/tcl-8.4/generic/tclPipe.c:341:                    Tcl_AppendResult(interp, "child killed: ", p, "\n",
/home/andreask/lsf/tcl-8.5/generic/tclPipe.c:332:                    Tcl_AppendResult(interp, "child killed: ", p, "\n", NULL);
/home/andreask/lsf/tcl-8.6/generic/tclPipe.c:332:                   Tcl_AppendResult(interp, "child killed: ", p, "\n", NULL);

and none of these places use waitStatus in the manner you describe.

What revision is your file ? (Look at the RCS: comment at the top).

I am a bit unclear on the platform reported.
What is UWIN ?

File Added - 310214: tclPipe.diff