Php – Segmentation fault when running PHP script from CLI, works fine as cron job

cronPHPsegmentation-fault

I have a PHP script that reads a file via fgetcsv through PHP's zip:// wrapper. This works fine locally and when run on production via a cron job. It fails with a Segmentation fault when invoked on production via CLI though, apparently at the end of reading the file when fgetcsv returns false.

The relevant parts of the script:

#!/usr/local/bin/php5
<?php

...

$i = 0;
while (($row = fgetcsv($file)) !== false) {

    // processing ...

    if (++$i % 50000 == 0) {
        echo '.';
    }
}

printf("\nFinished reading %s records.\n\n", number_format($i));
fclose($file);

And its output:

-bash-3.00$ ./script.php 
Reading file.zip................Segmentation fault

It appears to segfault before the printf but after having read all the records, so I suspect it fails when it reaches the end of the file.

-bash-3.00$ /usr/local/bin/php5 -v
PHP 5.2.8 (cli) (built: Apr 14 2010 16:08:06) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies
    with the ionCube PHP Loader v3.1.31, Copyright (c) 2002-2007, by ionCube Ltd.

What could be the cause for this and is there a way to fix it?

Best Answer

strace the proc to figure out where it's dying. A segfault is by definition an unhandled error, so the logs are unlikely to tell you much interesting. Speculation: php compiled against a shared library that's not available on the host to which it has been deployed.

Alternatively, since you say you're running on shared hosting, why not get the vendor's support channel involved? They can do a lot more with root access to figure out what's going on, and it's the environment they're providing that's broken.

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