Re: bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> On Sunday 08 September 2002 17:33, Alex Withers wrote:
> > Hello, I've recently installed Debian 3.0 on a home machine. After
> > logging into the machine through xdm I open an xterm with no trouble
> > but when I try to spawn another xterm it hangs for a few seconds
> > before spitting out the message: "bash: fork: Resource temporarily
> > unavailable".
>
> 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. They would
disappear in a few seconds and I would then get the vague error message.
I don't know why this caused the problem as $PAGER looked fine after the
hiccup. But it solved the problem when I removed the problem line...
Alex
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