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Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 12:55:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: Wayne Willcox <wayne AT reliant DOT immure DOT com>
cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: fork problem
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On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Wayne Willcox wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 12:19:49PM -0400, J. David Boyd wrote:
>
> > Since yesterday, (and, _of course_, I vehemently deny changing
> > anything in my system), I've been plagued with
> >
> > bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
> >
> > and an unadorned bash prompt.
> >
> > If I type exit:
> >
> > Sometimes it continues on to show my regular bash prompt, which leads
> > me to think that some call in my .profile failed.
> >
> > Sometimes, though, typing exit actually exits.
> >
> > Sometimes, if I just wait, the startup continues and my expected
> > prompt shows up.
> >
> > What would cause a fork to be temporarily unavailable?
>
> Out of resources on your system?

Dave,

Congratulations, you've most likely just encountered the problem that's
been plaguing me intermittently for quite a while.  From a previous
cursory investigation, it seems that Cygwin's process table gets full.
The "resource temporarily unavailable" is printed because Cygwin returns
EBUSY on such errors.  The error itself is bogus -- you're not out of
system resources.  FWIW, quitting all Cygwin processes and stopping Cygwin
services (in effect, reloading cygwin1.dll) usually helps.
Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to investigate it, and haven't
really encountered this in the past week, so didn't have a pressing need
to look into it either.  You can probably search for the error message in
the archives to get to my earlier posts (including the telltale strace
snippet that would show whether your problem is the same as mine).

One wild possibility is that you have an antivirus or firewall software
that holds on to process handles (and thus fills up Cygwin's process
table).  But I haven't done the experiments to confirm this.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_	    pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu | igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		old name: Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"Las! je suis sot... -Mais non, tu ne l'es pas, puisque tu t'en rends compte."
"But no -- you are no fool; you call yourself a fool, there's proof enough in
that!" -- Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac"

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