The etags program reliably crashes for me when running the test suite in
test/manual/etags, but you need to have a long-enough TEXTAGS
environment variable to make it happen.  On my 32-bit GNU/Linux machine,
going to that directory and running:

TEXTAGS="A:B:C:D:E:F:G:H:I:J:K:L:M:N:O:P:Q:R:S:T:U:V:W:X" make check

crashes the program before it finishes the first run, that is, before it
stops because the test suite itself fails.  Removing one member of
TEXTAGS allows it to complete, whereupon the test suite (correctly)
fails in the normal way.  Adding members gives me different crash
messages.  (The crash may well be machine and compiler dependent, so if
it fails to crash then adding things to TEXTAGS may work.)

Whether the program completes or no, and so long as you have something
in TEXTAGS, running etags under valgrind always gives the following
messages:

==14977== Invalid write of size 4
==14977==    at 0x804EF32: TEX_decode_env (etags.c:5808)

==14977== Invalid write of size 4
==14977==    at 0x804EF39: TEX_decode_env (etags.c:5809)

Lines 5808-9 add NULL to end TEX_toktab, and the latter therefore needs
to have one more slot allotted than there are actual members of the
string made from the default defenv (defined in etags.c) and the TEXTAGS
environment variable.  When allocating storage, the code counts colons,
and since the default defenv begins with a colon, it always gets the
extra slot by default when there is no TEXTAGS environment variable (and
those messages no longer appear under valgrind).  Define a TEXTAGS
variable, which according to the documentation doesn't start with a
colon, and there will be one slot too few.  The patch tests for whether
the final concatenated string starts with a colon or not, and increments
the starting value of len in TEX_toktab if it doesn't.

(Apologies for the long report -- I was sort of assuming that this might
be difficult to reproduce.)

Thanks,

David.

In GNU Emacs 29.0.50 (build 3, i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.18.9,
cairo version 1.14.6)
 of 2021-12-11 built on newfont
Repository revision: 8c50016b100ec2c548ec90131e0f5fb5f4ebb5c1
Repository branch: master
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11803000
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