lame tcsh bug report

[Jeff Squyres]

Greetings all.  I'm a long-time tcsh user, first time caller.

I have a fairly lame bug report/inquiry that is sparse on details  
mainly because the bug behavior occurs with low frequency and seems to  
be fairly random.  Specifically: although I've seen this bug for a  
year or two, I have not been able nail down exactly what causes it.   
Here's what I know:

- The bad behavior is that *sometimes* when you hit Ctrl-C in the  
middle of a command line, tcsh silently dies (rather than aborting the  
current line and going to a new/blank command prompt).  This is fairly  
annoying, but it happens so infrequently that it is difficult to  
gather specific information on exactly what causes the problem.   
Attempts to deliberately create the bug behavior have always been  
unsuccessful.  :-(

- I am using the built-in tcsh on OS X; I have seen this behavior on  
both Leopard (current release) and Tiger (previous release).  tcsh is  
my login shell.  tcsh on Leopard reports:

% tcsh --version
tcsh 6.14.00 (Astron) 2005-03-25 (i386-apple-darwin) options  
wide,nls,dl,al,kan,sm,rh,color,filec

I no longer have access to Tiger systems to see what version of tcsh  
they ship.

- tcsh does not appear to dump core when this happens; it just  
silently exits with no error message.  So I really have no further  
information on what is going wrong inside tcsh.

- The problem appears to occur only after you've been using tcsh for  
"a while" (I wish I could be more precise on this :-\ ).

- There seems to need to be characters on the command line for this  
problem to occur; I'm almost positive that I've never seen this  
problem occur when ctrl-C was typed as the first character on the  
command line.

- I have not strictly noted whether the cursor is always at the end of  
the line or somewhere in the middle of the line.  Twice earlier this  
morning (which is an unusually high frequency, and prompted me to post  
to this list), I had tcsh die when the cursor was at the end of the  
line.

- The bad behavior seems to *usually* happen when I've used up-arrow  
or ctrl-P to get to a previous command.

Again, I apologize for the lack of detail.  I'm posting to see if  
anyone else has ever seen this issue, and to see if anyone can suggest  
ways that I could get more information that would be helpful to the  
developers.

FWIW: I just downloaded the source for 6.15 and looked at the  
changelog; there doesn't appear to be anything in there about fixes  
for this behavior.  I also did a few google searches on the mailing  
list archives but didn't see anything related to this issue.

Thanks for your time.

-- 
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems