This line in main.cpp ...

{ FILE *foo = fopen("/tmp/f", "w"); fprintf(foo, "Main program = %s\n",
argv[0]); fclose(foo); }

...works for the first user to play the game but fails for any subsqeuent
players.  If /tmp/f already exists from a previous player then the current
player does not (normally, depending on umask) have write access so the
fopen() call failes.  When fclose() is called with foo set to NULL the
program segfaults.

Normally an insecurly created tmp file is bad news but this one does not
appear to be used for anything. I assume this is infact a snippet of debug
code that wasn't intented to be part of the final program.

Looking at the maelstrom homepage the versions available for download there
do not appear to include this code.  However there are differences between
the src.rpm and tar.gz there so it is not apparent weither this is redhat
specific code or possibly a bug that has been fixed in the official source
without a version number increase.