system() call causes core dump

[Peter Steele]

> I think the crash in the malloc is from a malloc in fstat or grep ( there is no malloc in system() ).

As a test I changed the 'fstat|wc -l' call we use now to 'ps aux|wc -l'. The problem does not occur all the time but the QA group is seeing it periodically during their test runs. I'm going to let the alternative version got through some days of testing to see if the problem occurs again. If it doesn't, it may very well be something to do with fstat. If it does, well, I guess we have more digging to do...