Errors in PS

[Rick Richardson]

In article <19496 at lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>, vijay at lll-winken.LLNL.GOV (Vijay Subramaniam) writes:
> Has anyone else been having trouble with PS giving a ps: seek error?
> The machine I am having this trouble on, is a SCO Xenix/386 
> running version 2.3.1 and tcp/ip networking software from 
> Streamlined Networks.

This may be related.  Or not.  I just saw a "ps: seek error" under
ISC 386/ix version 1.0.6 (first and only one time this happened).
The situation was a coding error (mine!) which started a program doing
infinite recursion.  While the stack was growing in leaps and bounds
I found that I could not interrupt it from the keyboard.  No
amount of INT character pounding stopped it, even though the program
did not catch any signals.  I switched to the console VT and issued
a "ps" to see what process # to kill.  The system was very sluggish,
with almost continuous disk activity going on.  The "ps" printed
a few lines and then gave the "ps: seek error".  By the time all this
finished, my errant program had exitted, taking with it the shell
on that VT.  The system returned to normal at this point and I just
logged in again and fixed the bug.

-Rick
-- 
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