Running the attached script on Solaris 11.4 or Solaris 11 OpenIndiana, in the coreutils-9.7 build tree, produces a crash: $ sh ~/cmd 42 351 ... 4 235 ... 42 351 ... /home/bruno/cmd: line 4: 18141: Memory fault(coredump) Segmentation Fault (core dumped) What triggers the crash is a %'g directive that produces a large number of digits. The gdb stack trace shows the location: inside function insert_thousands_sep in /lib/64/libc.so.1.