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From: Andrew Schulman <schulman DOT andrew AT epamail DOT epa DOT gov>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: GNU screen hangs
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:50:39 -0400
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> Cygwin (1.7 -- 1.5 is useless due to non-existent
> locale/UTF-8 support, although 1.7 doesn't shine in
> that either) was up to just a few weeks ago in a completely
> unusable state, because fg was broken, in addition to the=20
> X server, which has been unreliable for a couple of months
> now, crashing every 5 minutes. Then an update a couple of
> weeks ago fixed fg, so Cygwin become somewhat usable through
> the putty cygterm. But X still could not be relied upon.=20
> Then a couple of days ago there was a new set of updates
> available, including some to X, so of course I tried them.
> X wasn't fixed... but GNU screen had been broken, making=20
> Cygwin again completely unusable, because screen is necessary
> with the primitive Windows window management. (Tabbed putty
> would help.)
>=20
> The more specific problem is that GNU screen has started
> having random hangs, locking up the entire terminal.=20
> The hung screen sessions can not be reattached from a=20
> new terminal either; screen -r will just wait seemingly
> forever, although can be stopped with ^C. Even -list
> fails usually, although once I managed to get a list,
> but not attach anything, and -wipe removed everything.
> The hung screen process stayd there in the process=20
> listing.... Cygwin generally leaves a _lot_ of these=20
> zombies around, you have to do a manual clean-up at
> least once a week.

Tuomo, I don't know what would be causing this, and I can't reproduce it in
my 1.7 installation.  The screen package hasn't changed in the last 2 years
or so.  I have LANG=3Den_US, but I set it to en_US.UTF-8 and ran screen
without any problems.  My terminal is PuTTYcyg.

Please post the results of cygcheck -svr, as described at
http://cygwin.com/problems.html .

FWIW, I've been using both screen and the Cygwin X server in 1.7 for many
months now, and I've never seen any of the instability that you're
describing.  As for screen, hung or unreattachable sessions and zombie
processes used to be a common complaint, but that's been several years now.

Andrew.

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