memory fault

[Marc Unangst]

eric at abode.UUCP (Eric C. Bennett) writes:
> Sometimes when I play the gin game (that came with SCO XENIX) the program
> aborts and says,"Memory Fault" and dumps back to the $ prompt. Also, when
> it does this, the commands that I type are not displayed on the screen
> anymore and I am not able to log off. I have had this happen on one other
> program (that did not come with the SCO XENIX 2.3.2 system) that I have.

That sounds like a bug in the program.  Hardly surprising, considering
that it came with SCO Xenix.

To wake up your terminal, type 'stty sane' and then press ^J.  No, you
won't be able to see the characters echo.  Yes, you have to type ^J
instead of <return>.  That should fix things enough that you can reset
the terminal parameters the way you want them, or log out.  (FYI, the
problem is that when gin aborts, it leaves the terminal in 'raw' mode,
which means the tty driver doesn't interpret things like ^H, ^D, ^?,
^C, or any of the other characters it usually knows about.  It only
knows that ^J is the EOL character.  So, you need to run that 'stty'
command to put the terminal back into 'cooked' mode, where the tty
driver interprets all the control characters.)

> Does anyone have ideas on what causes this? Is there any solutions? Also,
> is there a way for the root user to log someone off of the system who is
> on another terminal?

Do a 'ps -fu user' command to find the PID of their login shell (it's
the one with argv[0][0] set to '-', and usually the lowest-numbered
PID in that process group), and then 'kill -1' it.

Note that this is a rather rude thing to do and won't exactly make the
user your best friend in the world.  They could potentially lose what
they're working on, which means you could get in trouble.  It's much
better to use 'write' to politely ask them to log off, and if they
don't do so in 5 minutes or so, ask them again.  Then, in another
minute or so, kill their shell if they're still logged on.

--
Marc Unangst               | "Decryption is not supported by crypt(C) in the
mju at mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us  |  export version of SCO Unix."
...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju |           -- SCO User Guide, Open DeskTop