Re: bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 12:19:21PM -0700, Alex Withers wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> > We had this on the list some days ago. Run ps ax and see if you've got a
> > huge quantity of (defunct) processes.
> 
> As it turns out that was it, in a way.  I had a line in my .bashrc that
> went like so:  PAGER=`which less`.  For some reason this would cause a
> momentary explosion in the number of "which" processes.

'which' is a shell script, so it read your .bashrc again, which called
'which', and so on ...

This should get round that problem by only setting $PAGER for
interactive shells. (It looks less verbose when you have several
environment variables to set in the same way.)

  case $- in
    *i*)
      export PAGER=`which less`
      ;;
  esac

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]