XEmacs aborts without nice messages if it can't find itself

This bug report will be sent to the XEmacs Development Team, not to your local site managers!! Please write in English, because the XEmacs maintainers do not have translators to read other languages for them. In XEmacs 21.2 "Clio" [Lucid] (sparc-sun-solaris2.7) of Tue Mar 9 1999 on rhea configured using `configure --prefix=/export/users/hamishm --verbose --site-prefixes=/export/users/hamishm' Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug and the precise symptoms of the bug: Around line 1695 of emacs.c, XEmacs does some DLL initialization using the value of Vinvocation_directory. I was running XEmacs in batch mode from a cron job, and it looked like the shell was finding xemacs OK, but was passing argv[0] as "xemacs", but passing a PATH which didn't include the executable directory. As a result of this, Vinvocation_name was set to "xemacs", and Vinvocation_directory was set to nil. During the DLL initialization, some code attempts to access string properties of Vinvocation_directory. Since we are doing error checking, this results in an abort. I think that a less drastic error message could be presented (in fact, without the HAVE_SHLIB definition, I think that I would get the standard "emacs can't find its environment" stuff I vaguely recall from the past. Hamish.