From: utzoo!decvax!cca!obrien@RAND-UNIX@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: close problem on single-use devices Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2563 Posted: Sun Aug 8 22:07:20 1982 Received: Mon Aug 9 05:28:10 1982 Date: Thursday, 22 Jul 1982 17:43-PDT There is a problem with devices which are single-use, when a process which has one open dies on a signal. It would appear that there are cases where the close routine is not called, hence locking the device until reboot (or mucking in /dev/kmem with adb, which amounts to the same thing). I believe Berkeley mentioned this, but did not have a fix. Does anyone out there know this symptom, and have a fix (or at least an explanation)? This has occurred in every version of UNIX I've ever seen, from V6 to 4.1BSD. It's particularly annoying when you gradually lose all of the "/dev/imp?" devices for talking to a network. I've also lost the magtape drive on occasion, though not under 4.1. It doesn't happen every time a process dies on a signal, just sometimes. TTY-generated signals do not seem to cause the problem as much as other signals.