Weird crash in Windows Ruby (installer, 1.8.2rc7a)

[Chris Sheppard]

Hi. I'm running a script on Ruby on Windows 2000, using the Ruby
Installer for Windows, version 1.8.2rc7a, and I very occasionally get
a very strange problem: it goes into the 'crash' mode, (similar to
what's shown for the Win32OLE bug on 1.8.1, which used to bite me
pretty regularly so I went to 'highly experimental' 1.8.2 versions for
a while; glad the installer is up to 1.8.2 now...). The weird thing
is that it doesn't ALWAYS happen, and it happens on a line that looks
like, literally:

until result =~ /#{PROMPT}$/

What's up with that? I've overwritten the main versions of the
interpreter with debug-symbols on; would this radically change things?
Because everything else seems to work ok... (ie I didn't build every
version of every library with the debug symbols, just the main stuff).
I seem to recall having this problem before tho, so I'm just
wondering what could be causing it, and what I could do to try to
debug it?

 

[Stephan Kämper]

until result =~ /#{PROMPT}$/

What's the value of PROMPT? What's the initial value of result?
What's the smallest piece of code that shows this behavior?

What's up with that? I've overwritten the main versions of the

If it just blows off, you might think about the value (or string
representation) of PROMPT. If there are some regex specific characters
in it it may either just not work or run into a very long session of
backtracking to find a regex match.

Happy rubying

Stephan