Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!edsews!uunet!pcrat!rick
From: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Errors in PS
Message-ID: <667@pcrat.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 89 09:26:35 GMT
References: <19496@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <341@belltec.UUCP>
Reply-To: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Distribution: na
Organization: PC Research, Inc., Tinton Falls, NJ
Lines: 26

In article <19496@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>, vijay@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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