When using xalan-c 1.10 and the supporting package xerces-c (3.0.1) from EPEL, Xalan would segfault when transforming xml with xslt. E.g.
[root@box generate]# Xalan test.xml test.xsl
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
/var/log/messages didn't have any helpful information:
Sep 30 17:52:01 box kernel: Xalan[25236]: segfault at 18 ip 00007f5b44758cb9 sp 00007fffa8ff33d0 error 4 in libxalan-c.so.110.0[7f5b444d3000+3e2000]
There seems to be a bug open for this at EPEL (Bug 807816 - Xalan-c segfaults on any input), but it has not been acknowledged or worked on.
I traced the problem to an incompatibility between xalan-c 1.10 and xerces-c 3.x. There is a patch as part of the EPEL xalan-c rpm which is meant to allow for this, but it seems broken as the source rpm didn't compile for me.
An easy fix here is to upgrade both xalan-c and xerces-c to the latest version. I hacked together rpms for these based on the work already done in EPEL:
xalan-c-1.11.0-1.el6.src.rpm xerces-c-3.1.1-1.el6.src.rpm
After initial testing it seems that this fixes the problem and XML can now be transformed in Xalan with XSLT