[GRASSLIST:5991] s.to.rast problem

I am experiencing a 'segmentation fault' error when attempting to
convert a 220 point site file to raster using s.to.rast . The file was
created in v.digit, and edited in AbiWord and vi. It works fine as a
sites file (d.siter, d.sites etc) but when I try to convert it to a
raster file, the 'segmentation fault' error appears and the operation
terminates. The same file converts successfully to raster using
s.surf.rst; however I would like a simple raster map showing just the
sites also. Any ideas on what is causing this problem, and more
fundamentally -- what is a 'segmentation fault'?

I am using an OpenOSX installation of GRASS 5.0.0 running on MacOSX
10.2.4

Thanks for any assistance.

Stuart Edwards
Verdant Energi and Environment

Stu wrote:

Any ideas on what is causing this problem

No. There are two common approaches to finding out the cause. One is
trial-and-error (i.e. looking for specific factors which might cause
the problem). The other is to use a debugger.

One issue to consider when creating or editing text files on a Mac is
that historically the Mac has used CR (carriage return, ASCII code 13)
as the end-of-line character, while Unix (and hence GRASS) uses LF
(line feed, ASCII code 10). Text files which look correct in a text
editor may not be interpreted correctly by other problems.

You can convert CR to LF using:

  tr '\r' '\n' < oldfile > newfile

and more fundamentally -- what is a 'segmentation fault'?

A segmentation fault corresponds to an invalid memory access; e.g.
reading from a non-existent memory location, or writing to a read-only
memory location.

--
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net>

Thanks for your response.

Glynn Clements wrote:

No. There are two common approaches to finding out the cause. One is
trial-and-error (i.e. looking for specific factors which might cause
the problem). The other is to use a debugger.

I was afraid it might come down to that. Is it significant that

recently there have been quite a number of requests for assistance/
comments on segfaults -- even today (see 5990), 5955 on April 3 and 5889
on March 27 -- in relation to the use of r.to.rast?

One issue to consider when creating or editing text files on a Mac is
that historically the Mac has used CR (carriage return, ASCII code 13)
as the end-of-line character, while Unix (and hence GRASS) uses LF
(line feed, ASCII code 10). Text files which look correct in a text
editor may not be interpreted correctly by other problems.

You can convert CR to LF using:

        tr '\r' '\n' < oldfile > newfile

Thanks for the conversion -- I have previously used BBedit's Mac to

Unix conversion, but that is cumbersome. In this case I had studiously
tried to avoid Mac cr's (using v.digit generated files edited in vi) and
the fact that r.surf.rst executed successfully suggests this may not be
the problem.

Thanks again
Stu