[ruby-core:35074] Re: Bug in system()?

On 03/02/2011 14:01, Luis Lavena wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Anthony Wright<[e-mail]>  wrote:
>> I've just hit a problem where the system() method to call an external
>> program failed in a fairly unpredictable way, and I couldn't get any clues
>> from within ruby to diagnose the problem. As a result I ended up debugging
>> process.c to work out what the problem was.
>>
> Please provide which version of Ruby (ruby -v) and which platform
> you're using (uname -a)
>
ruby version is 1.9.2p0 on i686-linux built from source

The system is a custom built system based on linux 2.6.30.1 32 bit

Probably the easiest way to reproduce the problem would be to modify the 
code to replace the fork() call with code that simulates it failing, 
i.e. returns -1 and sets errno to ENOMEM. In other words on line 2481 
change:

for (; before_fork(), (pid = fork()) < 0; prefork()) {

to

for (; before_fork(), errno=ENOMEM, (pid = -1) < 0; prefork()) {