Re: Interesting race condition...

[Marc Ballarin <Ballarin.Marc@gmx.de>]

Rob Landley <rob <at> landley.net> writes: 
 
> Oh I can't reproduce it either.  (Maybe if I set some kind of loop and left 
> it running for a few days...) 
 
I could reproduce it on an otherwise idle system (2 GHz Athlon, kernel 2.6.7). 
On a loaded system the bug did not occur, which certainly indicates a race 
condition. 
 
Using the following Bash script, the bug appeared 23 times in 122,221 
iterations: 
while [ 1 ];do 
        ps ax | grep hack >> TEST 
done 
 
The bug *seems* to be in bash, since an equivalent script in tcsh had no 
problems: 
while ( 1 ) 
        ps ax | grep hack >> TEST2 
end 
 
This issue has the potential to break a lot of shell scripts in an almost 
undebugable way. Should someone file a bug report via 'bashbug'? 
 
Marc