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Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 23:50:49 PST
From: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com>
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To: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.ORG
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Subject: gnu/5767: man leaves partially formatted cat pages when fork fails
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>Number:         5767
>Category:       gnu
>Synopsis:       man leaves partially formatted cat pages when fork fails
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:
>Keywords:
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Feb 17 00:00:01 PST 1998
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Bill Fenner
>Organization:
Xerox
>Release:        FreeBSD 3.0-CURRENT i386
>Environment:

Some limited number of processes.

>Description:

man can fail to format a man page, but not notice:

% man rs
Formatting page, please wait.../usr/bin/groff:fatal error: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
Done.
%

It then puts this "formatted" page in /usr/share/man/cat1:

-rw-r--r--  1 man  bin  20 Feb 16 23:37 /usr/share/man/cat1/rs.1.gz

and there's no obvious way to make man use the original source if the
cat file exists and is newer.  I ended up removing the cat file as root,
but if I wasn't root I'd be helpless to read this man page even after
exiting some processes.

>How-To-Repeat:

Run "man" when you're near your process limit.

>Fix:
	
There are two things to fix:
1. Make man notice failures like this.  This presumably requires not using
   popen().
2. Add a switch to force formatting from source even if the cat page exists.
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:

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