"Too many open files" problem

[Benoit Rochefort <Benoit dot Rochefort at gerad dot ca>]

Yes I searched the archive the best I can.

Is there an easy way to search for exact match in the mailing list
database, if so please tell me how. Because when I looked at "too many open
files", there were a lot lot lot of mail unrelated to this (it seems that
the program looks at text were the 4 words are there, but not necessarly
together).

So, this is my problem:

###############################################################################
$ find -name GCMref
$ find -name GCMref|xargs grep ''
grep: ./netgen-5.6/GCMref: Too many open files
$ find -name GCMref              
./netgen-5.6/GCMref
$ xargs grep ''
./netgen-5.6/GCMref            <--- Entered by hand
gencol-4.3                     <--- From grep
$ grep '' ./netgen-5.6/GCMref  <--- Same as above (from xargs point-of-view)
gencol-4.3
###############################################################################

As you can see, something seems to arise when using the pipes.

I have seen a manifestation of this problem in other contexts (for
instance, in perl scripts).

And what's bizare is that it is hard to reproduce exactly. For exemple, in
the last example, I re-issued the first command after all the others, and
it works well!?!

So I close the shell, re-start it and was I able to reproduce it (sometime
yes, sometime no). 

Sometime ( I don't know if it's related ), the "." command in bash silently
fails, returning at the prompt (I suspect it's a case of "too many open
files" but I'm not sure). It is really inconvenient since i may think that
all goes well (the real case is the .bashrc making many ".", some of them
in cascades (say depth 3 max, and in all max 30 files to source). In this
case, we return at the prompt, no advice, and some variables are not
setted. It is really hard to reproduce, but happen say 1 on 20 time.

Someone has had this problem around?

And another (may be related) question:

Can someone explain me why this perl script on Solaris return 251,
on Linux 1022 and on cygwin runs forever?

$ touch aaa; perl -e 'for ( $n = 1; open "f$n", "aaa"; $n++ ) {} print "$n\n"'

>From this, I may assume that the fd table could be dynamic, but in that
case why are the other example crashes with "too many open files"???



           *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤  Benoit Rochefort  *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤

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