Resolving the issue of Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Question

I'm using a Ubuntu 18.04 guest OS in Oracle VirtualBox. I was successfully running sRNAscanner with different inputs until a few days ago. Now I'm getting a segmentation fault (core dumped) error message when trying to run sRNAscanner. I have tried clearing out the junk and restarting fresh, but the same problem arises.

I'm getting the following error message.

-rwxr-xr-x 1 ubuntu ubuntu   74030 Aug 31  2010 sRNAscanner_Ubuntu10.exec

ubuntu@ubuntu:~/Downloads/sRNAscanner_Ubuntu10$ ./sRNAscanner_Ubuntu10.exec Input.data
please wait data is being processed.
Sliding in Progress..
Checking spacer value one ...
Checking spacer value two ....
*** stack smashing detected ***: <unknown> terminated
Aborted (core dumped)

ubuntu@ubuntu:~/Downloads/sRNAscanner_Ubuntu10$./sRNAscanner_Ubuntu10.exec Input.data
please wait data is being processed.
Sliding in Progress..
Checking spacer value one ...
Checking spacer value two ....
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Answer 1

Obviously you did install the binary package for Ubuntu 10 (from 2010) from this website. I'm surprised that you've been able to run it sucessfully at all, and assume that some lib update has finally broken it, that case is covered in this answer, but other reasons like invalid input data are also possible.

You can try to find an alternative and more up-to-date source for the binary package; I can imagine that interest in this software is quite high these days. If you don't succeed with that, your best chance to get it running cleanly on a current distribution like 18.04 is probably to try compiling the program from the source, which is available from the same page. As this needs the appropriate development tools installed and some know-how, be prepared to invest some effort into that, or seek the support of experienced developers or IT staff.

Another alternative would be to set up a virtual machine with that old version of Ubuntu (there might also be ready-made images available), then install and run the package in there. This is also not a trivial task if you've never done it before, but should still be easier than building it.