Corrupt Shapefiles Crash Mapserver

[sdteffen@…]

PHP/Mapscript (Tested with the 4.4.1 and 4.5 win32 binaries from maptools.org)
crashes without error message if it encounters a corrupted shapefile.

To create a corrupted shapefile, just take the two shapefiles a and b (which
have a different number of records), copy
a.shp over b.shp and try to use b.shp in PHP/Mapscript - I believe it
will be the same problem in mapserver itself.

A simple check "number of shapefile records == number of dbf records) might
overcome a problem. If this is bad for the performance, the tile4ms and/or 
shptree tools should perform the check.

shpchk and/or Shapechk are tools that show how such a test can be performed.

http://sdteffen.de/bauinfo/shpchk.c

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/2295/howto_shapechk.html