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Re: Infinite Loop In "rm -fr" When Busy File Encountered


Chris,

OK. I ran the strace test as you requested.

Here's the invocation of strace I used in place of the unadorned "rm -fr 
subdir" invocation from my earlier report:

% strace -d -n -S 1 -w -o rm-fr-strace-out rm -fr subdir


I waited a few seconds then closed the sub-window.

A Bzip2-compressed form of "rm-fr-strace-out" is attached (19.77 : 1 
compression!). A 170-column-wide window will eliminate line wrapping.

If you seach for "lstat: entering" you'll see the infinitely repeating 
sequence of operations. I'm not entirely sure, but that appears to be the 
"entry point" of the loop. There appear to be 270 iterations present in the 
strace log.

If you're a Vim-er, this macro will help you see the pattern:

:map ^[N Nzz

("^[" is an escape, naturally, which requires a prefix CTRL-V if entered 
manually--mine originates in my .vimrc).

Prime the search patter given above and then enter repeated ALT-N and 
you'll see that only the timestamps along the left change.


One last piece of information, after running strace and killing the waiting 
Java program, "subdir/target" is gone and a simple "rmdir subdir" succeeds.


Let me know if I can help further.

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 10:24 2002-04-06, Chris January wrote:
> > Now I do this:
> >
> > % mkdir subdir
> > % java Writer subdir/target Now is the time
> >
> >
> > In a separate Cygwin window:
> >
> > % cd tstdir
> > % rm -fr subdir
> >
> >
> > And the symptom is manifest: rm sits there, churning away, awaiting its
>death at the hands of a merciless signal.
>
>What output do you get with:
>strace -fr subdir
>?

Attachment: rm-fr-strace-out.bz2
Description: Binary data

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