I have been using a command similar to the following to print ld's default
linker script.  When using binutils 2.19.51.20090805 in the current version of
Ubuntu karmic, the linker script gets truncated and gcc prints a warning about a
segmentation fault (which does not cause gcc to return a non-zero exit code).

$ gcc -static -nostartfiles -nostdlib /usr/lib/libc.a -Wl,-z,noexecstack
-Wl,--verbose
collect2: ld terminated with signal 11 [Segmentation fault]
GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.19.51.20090805
  Supported emulations:
   elf_x86_64
   elf_i386
   i386linux
   elf_l1om
using internal linker script:
==================================================
...

Note that this has to be run in a writable current working directory to
reproduce the problem, because it tries to write an "a.out" file.

The segfault can be reproduced with this more minimal invocation of ld:

$ ld --build-id /usr/lib/libc.a
Segmentation fault

$ dpkg -s binutils | grep Version
Version: 2.19.51.20090805-1ubuntu1