From: William Morgan <wmorgan-ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-01-05T08:30:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Possible ruby bug involving threads and IO

Excerpts from Lucas Nussbaum's mail of  4 Jan 2005 (EST):
> Ruby hangs on IO.read("/proc/uptime").

This is probably the same issue described in:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/109668
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/110600

The upshot is that certain files in /proc/ seem to hang on a select()
call, which Ruby uses for I/O within threads. You can do an strace and
watch the difference between doing this from within and from without a
Thread.

My workaround was something along the lines of:
  system "cat /proc/#{file} > #{tmpfile}"
  f = File.open tmpfile

I don't know that there's a better solution.

-- 
William <wmorgan-ruby-talk@masanjin.net>