hanging jobs

[Brain in Neutral]

> We've seen runaway Emacses, too.  I believe we determined that it happens
> when the user hangs up the phone or closes a telnet or rlogin connection
> while in Emacs.  The system call that Emacs uses to read from the terminal
> just returns no characters in this situation, rather than blocking or
> returning an error code, so Emacs goes into a tight loop trying to read
> input.  I don't remember any more details, though.

That's my guess on the hung mailers, too.  I see sendmail processes every
now and then that chew up our whole machine and have to be killed.  Usually
it can be traced to something odd happening while the mailer was collecting
a message.  I figured it was due to not detecting EOF properly.

Paul DuBois
dubois at primate.wisc.edu