biber 1.9 crashes without any useful message... about biber HOT 14 CLOSED

The first message indicated that the underlying C library btparse is dying. This usually means that you have some really nasty problem with your bib file. Can you narrow down the .bib file to one entry which causes the crash?

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I tried to remove some entries. But, with the same file, Biber works some times and crashes the other times !

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Which OS are you using? The first thing to do is to delete the packer cache. Run biber --cache and delete whatever directory this returns. Then run biber --help and don't do anything until the help output has scrolled past and you get a prompt back so that biber can unpack correctly. Then see if the situation has improved.

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My OS is Ubuntu 14.04 and my distribution is a "vanilla" TeXLive 2014 updated via "tlmgr". I deleted the cache directory from "/tmp" but the bug still occurs.

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Are you sure it's random? I've never seen that before on any platform. There is no reliable .bib which will always fail?

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Yes. It's random (with the same .bib and the same .bcf). I can post the .bib and the .bcf somewhere...

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Hmm, this is really strange. There have been library linking errors on linux in the past but this means it just doesnt' work until I change the build settings. Can you post to T.S.E to see if anyone else with Ubuntu 14 has the same issue?

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T.S.E = tex.stackexchange.com ?

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Sorry, yes ...

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I have tried (with the same .bib and .bcf) on Windows 7 with a fresh installation of TeXLive 2014: it's the same results. Sometimes biber crashes with SEGV and sometimes it works...

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Ok, then can you paste the smallest possible .tex and .bib file which do this so I can reproduce the problem?

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Here is an archive containing a "small" example: allbib.tex and all-library.bib.

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You have a really bad syntax error in entry "Faleh1988". The author name is:

author = {el- Faleh, El M\^{a}ti and Lucas, Jacques},

Notice the space after "el-". This is a disaster for bibtex parsing routines as it looks like a prefix but isn't attached to anything. Removing that space makes it work. In general, in such cases, just divide your .bib in half repeatedly to find the guilty entry, then it's usually obvious what the problem is when you have the bad entry to look at.

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Thanks for your help...

Is it possible that Biber indicates more clearly the problematic entry?

A binary search is probably feasible for an "advanced" user like me ... But a basic user will not do it!

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