From: Anthony Wright <anthony@...>
Date: 2011-02-03T01:49:33+09:00
Subject: Bug in system()?

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, so I ended up debugging process.c to work out what the problem was.

My code looks something like:

system("/bin/tar --extract --directory=#{dir} --file=#{file}")

if $?.exitstatus !=0
    raise "tar unpack failed with exitstatus: #{$?.exitstatus}"
end

But it fails on the if because '$?' isn't being set by the failing system() method and so '$?' is nil.

The problem ultimately boiled down to the fork() system call failing with ENOMEM (badly configured system, but that's another matter).

Am I missing something here? Should there be a way to get errno from ruby, or am I missing other diagnostic information I could have used?

Is there a bug in system()? Shouldn't it always set '$?' ?

thanks,

Anthony Wright