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To: Rob Snow <rsnow@legend.txdirect.net>
cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: man error: cannot fork() ? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 07 Jul 1995 17:24:57 CDT."
             <Pine.BSF.3.91.950707172028.10788A-100000@oasis> 
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Date: Mon, 10 Jul 1995 09:00:57 -0500
From: "Eric L. Hernes" <erich@jake.lodgenet.com>
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> 
> Over the last couple of days I've seen this a couple of times and now I 
> think it wasn't just a one time thing.
> 
> rsnow@oasis% man sendmail 		; or anything else
> groff:fatal error: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
> 
> here is the ouput from the following:
> $ man sendmail >error_file 2>&1
> $ cat error_file
> 
> Cannot fork
> Error executing formatting or display command.
> system command exited with status 512
> No manual entry for sendmail

I'd say you're out of processes.  You might try
$ ps auxxww |wc -l

(if there's enough processes for that to run.)

I've got the following two lines in my kernel config file to let me 
be a resource pig.

options		"CHILD_MAX=128"
options		"OPEN_MAX=128"

It looks like you might be able to do the same with sysctl, but I haven't
tried that.

> 
> what makes that happen?
> 
> ps.	205R, X, fvwm, screen
> 
> ---
> Rob Snow
> rsnow@txdirect.net
> 
> 
eric.
--
erich@lodgenet.com
erich@rrnet.com