I was writing some unit-tests for libotr with libtap (a pretty cool and simple C unit-test library), when I stumbled upon this:
test_dh (Wstat: 139 Tests: 5 Failed: 0)
Non-zero wait status: 139
Parse errors: Bad plan. You planned 7 tests but ran 5.
I checked that I wrote seven tests and not five, that my build system was correct, that nothing was wrong in the code, and found nothing obvious.
The explanation is that 139 % 128 = 11, which is a SIGSEGV: my code was segfaulting. This is why it couldn't run seven tests: the fifth one killed the program. Everything turned to green after a proper fix of a unallocated variable.