Arg, I spoke too soon. strace was giving me some gratuitous
errors of the form 'ptrace: umoven: I/O error', which distracted me.
Here is a relevant section of a script:
Script started on Sat Nov 29 02:10:16 1997
~/tmp$ ar -V
GNU ar version 2.7
~/tmp$ strace ar rcs new.a
...
open(ptrace: umoven: I/O error
0, O_RDONLY) = -1 EFAULT (Bad address)
...
Script done on Sat Nov 29 02:10:39 1997
'new.a' is a file that doesn't already exist. The first argument to
'open' is 0.
This bug has been in 'ar' for quite a while.
Hope this helps,
Michael Chastain
<mailto:mec@shout.net>
"love without fear"