Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think!Think.COM!barmar From: barmar@Think.COM Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix Subject: Re: hanging jobs Message-ID: <32053@news.Think.COM> Date: 7 Dec 89 06:20:30 GMT References: Sender: news@Think.COM Distribution: comp Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA Lines: 18 In article saus@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@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar