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Message-Id: <200209161858.OAA20230@cs.umb.edu>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Curious behavior of CYGSERVER/rm infinite loop
In-Reply-To: Your message of "16 Sep 2002 14:36:44 -0000."
             <1032187004 DOT 20821 DOT ezmlm AT cygwin DOT com> 
Reply-To: rouilj AT ieee DOT org
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 14:58:36 -0400
From: "John P. Rouillard" <rouilj AT cs DOT umb DOT edu>

In message <1032187004 DOT 20821 DOT ezmlm AT cygwin DOT com>,
cygwin-digest-help AT cygwin DOT com writes:
>From: "David A. Cobb" <superbiskit AT cox DOT net>
... 

>It varies!  One thing, however, that is pretty consistant: when
>configure freezes up, the "active" process is rm.exe, spawned by
>sh.exe.  This even happened once when a parameter error caused the
>configure script to fail; assuming that happened within maybe
>10-minutes, the rm.exe hung around for 3-hours while I went away and
>came back.  Then I did something really strange: I fired off a second
>terminal session and ran gdb, attaching to the rm.exe process.  The
>EIP is way up in Microsoft land: 0x77f9f9e0.
[...]
>Now, I don't know whether pids get reused that quickly!  But this
>looks like a classical deadly embrace.  The same sort of suggestion
>comes from watching rm.exe's handles from ProcessExplorer.  When it's
>stuck it keeps activating and then killing handles on one single
>/tmp/ directory.  It seems it is trying to get control of some
>resource, being denied, and not quite knowing what to do.  As in
>retrying when the status != EAGAIN(?)

Could this be the result of an rm of an open file?

Under windows, you can't remove an open file. Under Unix/Posix you
can.

If rm tries to remove a directory with an open file in it, it will
fail leading to an infinite loop (reported elsewhere in the archives).
I am not sure how/when/if the loop is broken. Maybe having cygserver
running perturbs the timing slightly and allows the rm to succeed by
having the file closed before the first rm attempt?

				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
===============================================================================
My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.

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