We've been debugging a problem where nul (and other control) characters have been randomly appearing in powerpc parallel build logs. In the process, I noticed that some of the nuls are readily reproducible. One such case is due to the pr32627.f03 test which verifies that Fortran programs can initialize character arrays from C strings. The test declares an array as big as the C string (including the terminating nul) and prints its value to stdout. This then causes the nul to appear in the log files. The attached patch changes the declaration of the Fortran array to match the number of non-nul characters. Tested on powerpc64. Martin