Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 23:50:49 PST From: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com> To: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: gnu/5767: man leaves partially formatted cat pages when fork fails Message-ID: <199802170750.XAA07143@fenestro.parc.xerox.com>
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>Number: 5767 >Category: gnu >Synopsis: man leaves partially formatted cat pages when fork fails >Confidential: no >Severity: serious >Priority: medium >Responsible: freebsd-bugs >State: open >Quarter: >Keywords: >Date-Required: >Class: sw-bug >Submitter-Id: current-users >Arrival-Date: Tue Feb 17 00:00:01 PST 1998 >Last-Modified: >Originator: Bill Fenner >Organization: Xerox >Release: FreeBSD 3.0-CURRENT i386 >Environment: Some limited number of processes. >Description: man can fail to format a man page, but not notice: % man rs Formatting page, please wait.../usr/bin/groff:fatal error: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable Done. % It then puts this "formatted" page in /usr/share/man/cat1: -rw-r--r-- 1 man bin 20 Feb 16 23:37 /usr/share/man/cat1/rs.1.gz and there's no obvious way to make man use the original source if the cat file exists and is newer. I ended up removing the cat file as root, but if I wasn't root I'd be helpless to read this man page even after exiting some processes. >How-To-Repeat: Run "man" when you're near your process limit. >Fix: There are two things to fix: 1. Make man notice failures like this. This presumably requires not using popen(). 2. Add a switch to force formatting from source even if the cat page exists. >Audit-Trail: >Unformatted: To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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