problem suspending "man bash" (intermittent)

[Dario Alcocer]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 11:02:59PM -0400, Lev Bishop wrote:
> Here follow detailed results of my experimenting.
> 
> Send the manpage to a file:
> $ man bash > mb
> Use less to look at it:
> $ less mb
> No problems suspending/restarting.
> Use a pipeline in a subshell to view it (the way "man" does it):
> $ (cat mb | less)
> Now we have the almost the same problem as I described in my first 
> message - under xterm the 1st keypress sometimes goes to less instead of 
> to bash, subsequently foregrounding the pipeline less doesn't redraw the 
> screen properly, needs a newline after all commands, etc; under 
> console the pipeline sometimes just dies without any error message.
> 
> More interestingly, if I don't put the pipeline in a subshell, then the 
> problem changes, /and ceases to be intermittent/.
> $ cat mb | less
> Now the problem is the same whether in xterm or console: if I ^Z then the 
> pipeline suspends (both processes shown by ps with an 'S', they stop 
> responding to keypresses) but control doesn't return to bash, and the only 
> way to unwedge things is to use "kill -CONT" from another window. 

I've duplicated this bug. In fact, I'm unable to kill the pipeline,
although in my case, I didn't try CONT first, just KILL.

So, it would appear that one cannot suspend pipelines that have pending
input waiting.

-- 
Dario Alcocer -- Sr. Software Developer, Helix Digital Inc.
alcocer@helixdigital.com -- http://www.helixdigital.com

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