Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sjuvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!houxz!vax135!floyd!cmcl2!seismo!hao!hplabs!sdcrdcf!sdcsvax!akgua!psuvax1!burdvax!sjuvax!jss From: jss@sjuvax.UUCP (Jonathan Shapiro) Newsgroups: net.eunice Subject: Re: shell escape causes vi to lock up Message-ID: <349@sjuvax.UUCP> Date: Tue, 5-Jun-84 13:54:29 EDT Article-I.D.: sjuvax.349 Posted: Tue Jun 5 13:54:29 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 13-Jun-84 02:35:30 EDT References: <618@t4test.UUCP> Organization: Saint Josephs Univ. Phila., Pa. Lines: 58 [ Is this bug selective, at least? maybe even a VIRTUAL BUG ? ] I think I know what happens when your shell escape locks, and I am going to use this opportunity to resurface my plea yet again, in the vain hope that someone may yet answer. When you run out of VMS processes, VMS hangs waiting for one of your processes to complete before it gives you the new one. Suppose now that you are in vi. You are now in your third process - one for your login VMS job, another for your eunice shell, and another vi. you exec a shell escape - process #4. If you do something like an ls, that fires up another process to accomplish the sort, process #5. basically, there are loads of processes invisibly hanging around. Further, after you are done with a spawned job, eunice hangs onto it for a while so that if you ask for another it can reuse it. The catch? EUNICE doesn't actually seem to do the reuse part in real life. The final scenario runs like this: vi spawns a job, and lets go of stdin and stdout so that the spawned job can have them. VMS gets a job request and goes hunting down the process list to see how many processes you are running. It concludes that you are at your limit and waits for one of those other processes (all of which are actively in use to main- tain you where you are) to finish before exec'ing the new process. Until the new process execs, no one has claim on the stdin and stdout for your terminal. All you can do is fill the typeahead buffer (if you have one) in frustration. NOT EVEN INTERRUPTS GO ANYWHERE - you are hung in one of the problem spots between EUNICE and VMS. Actually, it is a bit worse than that. If you examine VMS job list you will find that at least one of your jobs - the one which is trying to spawn - is in mwait. go looking at the manuals and find out, if you don't know, what mwait means and you will realize that that state is truly ugly indeed. So that is what I suspect has happened to you. NOW THE PLEA: We are DESPERATELY trying to get netnews and uucp running on our system. Would ANYONE who has by hook or by crook managed to do it please contact me either at sjuvax!jss by e-mail or at Haverford College if they are willing to help us? I have gotten many requests from people saying they don't know how and would like to know how. If you want help, I am collecting those requests as soon as I am able to help (if ever). Come on folks, enough stuff is going out that someone out there is running EUNICE on the net. Please help us out... Jonathan S. Shapiro Haverford College Haverford Pa. 19041 sjuvax!jss