Re: Fork errors

[Mark Geisert <mark@maxrnd.com>]

Dale Lobb via Cygwin wrote:
>    Since upgrading to the latest version of Cygwin a few weeks ago on a server I manage, I've been experiencing an issue with fork errors.  The Cygwin installation had not been updated for almost a year before that.
> 
>    The issue happens every time a script is invoked that purges files from some temporary directories, but never in the same place in the script.  The script uses multiple calls to find -exec to remove files over 10 days old from the directories.  Here is a typical error.  Sometime the issue will assert after just a  few tens of files deleted, sometimes after hundreds or thousands of files have been deleted:
> 
>      removed '/cygdrive/d/.../obfuscated.datedata.txt'
>            1 [main] find 20066 dofork: child -1 - forked process 4068 died unexpectedly, retry 0, exit code 0xC0000142, errno 11
>            find: cannot fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
> 
>    It also happens randomly at other times.  I've seen the bash shell itself fail on the invocation of a mintty.  I've seen it happen on all sorts of interactive commands entered from bash.
> 
>    Today, as a test, I updated all the installed Cygwin components.  One of the post installation scripts failed, so I re-exec'd it:
> 
>      $ ./postinstall/0p_update-info-dir.dash
>      Rebuilding info directory
>          2 [main] dash 2059 dofork: child -1 - forked process 7676 died unexpectedly, retry 0, exit code 0xC0000142, errno 11
>          ./postinstall/0p_update-info-dir.dash: 22: Cannot fork
> 
>    A second re-exec then worked fine.
> 
>    I've tried reinstalling all the components, and I've tried rebaseall.
> 
>    Is there anything else I can try, or troubleshooting steps to take?

Try the FAQ, specifically
https://cygwin.com/faq.html#faq.using.fixing-fork-failures

Pay attention to the subtleties of running rebaseall, e.g. make sure no Cygwin 
processes (background server processes or whatnot) are running.  When the FAQ gets 
to talking about running setup.exe for this situation, it means close any open 
Cygwin shell windows and manually run the Cygwin Setup program, just taking its 
defaults all the way through; you needn't install anything it suggests at this 
time.  The object is to get to Setup's end where it runs a full rebase.

Speculation: The specific exit code 0xC0000142 may or may not have something to do 
with Windows error 142, which is ERROR_BUSY_DRIVE.  I cannot help further on this.

..mark

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