TY - JOUR T1 - Cauchy Problem for General Rst Order Inhomogeneous Quasilinear Hyperbolic Systems JO - Journal of Partial Differential Equations VL - 1 SP - 46 EP - 68 PY - 2002 DA - 2002/02 SN - 15 DO - http://doi.org/ UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/jpde/5440.html KW - Quasilinear hyperbolic system KW - matching condition KW - life-span KW - weak linear degeneracy AB - In this paper, we consider Cauchy problem for general first order inho- mogeneous quasilinear strictly hyperbolic systems. Under the matching condition, we first give an estimate on inhomogeneous terms. By this estimate, we obtain the asymptotic behaviour for the life-span of C¹ solutions with “slowly” decaying and small initial data and prove that the formation of singularity is due to the envelope of characteristics of the same family.