hanging jobs

[barmar at Think.COM]

In article <SAUS.89Dec6220626 at media-lab.media.mit.edu> saus at media-lab.media.mit.edu (Mark Sausville) writes:
>Certain processes seem to hang around doing something long after the
>users who had initiated them have gone home.  Emacs (gnu 18.54) and
>mail (/usr/ucb/mail - ultrix)  are two of the more prominent offending
>programs.

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.


Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar