[matthewmodern]

Here's a bizarre situation: I am running a bundled BSD binary via a NSTask. About 50% of the time, the subprocess bombs out with a SIGSEGV (my main app keeps running). What's interesting is even when I am using identical arguments, it will run with 100% success from the command line.

I'm fairly sure that it's some incompatibility in the code of the BSD binary, but why would it only show up when run as a NSTask? This seems counter-intuitive to me. Therefore my question is, what strange things could the NSTask be doing that would cause the subprocess to occasionally bomb?

[lindberg]

Your environment might be different. Anything you do in your .cshrc (or similar) will be available to your command-line launch, but not to the NSTask launch (if you're launching the NSTask from a GUI program anyways).

A task launched from a GUI app also won't have a tty... is the BSD tool reading from stdin at any point?