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Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:32:07 -0800 (PST)
From: Tony Tung <tonytung@merly.org>
To: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050217012601.GI69640@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Subject: Re: emacs on freebsd 5.3
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On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> On Wednesday, 16 February 2005 at 17:20:24 -0800, Tony Tung wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have an unusual problem I was hoping someone could help me with.  I have
>> a FreeBSD 5.3 server that's been up for longer than a month.  In that
>> period, everything seemed fine.  However, all of a sudden, I'm no longer
>> able to spawn a shell in emacs.  In fact, I cannot start any process
>> (shell, gdb, grep, compile) inside emacs.  It is happening to all the
>> users, which makes me wonder if there's some OS-related issue in play
>> here.
>>
>> I've tried restarting emacs, bypassing the emacs startup file,
>> reinstalling emacs, and just about everything I could think of short of
>> restarting the server (don't want to do that until I'm physically
>> present).
>
> It would be worth attaching a ktrace to the Emacs to see what it's
> doing.  Something like this:
>
>  $ ps aux | grep emacs
>  root    12978  0.0  1.3 12880 9832  p5  R     8Oct04 222:09.31 emacs
>  $ ktrace -i -p 12978
>  (in Emacs, do your thing)
>  $ ktrace -C -p 12978
>  $ kdump | less
>
> You should then look for a call to fork or execve and see what errors
> are returned.
>
> Greg

Hi,

Strangely enough, that seems to have fixed the problem.  Other users are 
seeing a return to "normal" behavior as well.

Thanks,
Tony