Background writes in csh

[Harald.Eikrem at elab-runit.sintef.no]

Joe Wells <jbw at bu.edu> responding to Gordon C. Galligher <gorpong at ping.uucp>:
================
   >
   >   alias ls 'ls -FC \!* |more'
   >
   >This works fine, however sometimes it stops both tasks and puts them in 
   >the background, (this is on various Suns using csh and tcsh).  Typing
   >fg restarts the listing.  This is really irritating, typing fg and all.
   >
   >I've also had this problem on the IBM RS/6000.  Except in this case
   >typing fg just hangs the shell.

   More(1) is the problem here.  I have not quite figured it out, but I had a 
   similar problem when my users would type:  history | more and it would do
   the same thing.  When they use history | less  it works every time.

I suspect you're wrong, because there is a known problem with Sun's csh
that causes this problem with pipelines in general.  It's a race condition
during the setup of the pipeline by the csh.  I suspect that less works
because it has a larger executable file and thus takes slightly longer for
SunOS to load.

I don't know about the problem on the IBM RS/6000.
================


I dont know.  I experience this problem somewhat different on a Sun Sparc
490 with os 4.0.3.  I always use tcsh 5.12, btw.  I think in nearly half
the cases I pipe something into less, less hangs indefinitely and I have to
suspend it with a ^Z and then fg.  Nothing whatsoever gets written to my tty
until I hit ^Z.  I dont regularly use `more', but have not seen this behaviour
with that one as of yet.  What is going on?

--Harald E