Re: non-deterministic compression results with gzip -n9

[Zack Weinberg]

I've seen inexplicable nondeterminism like this before, and quite
often it's turned out to be controlled by the total size of the
command line argument area (that is, argv + environ + ELF auxv).
Changes in how big that is change the initial stack pointer address,
and while that *shouldn't* matter to anything, sometimes it does.

A shell loop of the form

export X=
i=0
while [ i -lt 8192 ]; do
perform test
X=${X}x
i=$((i+1))
done

should catch it if this is the cause.