Re: endless loop in /usr/bin/find ?

[James Youngman]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 09:53:32AM +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:

> The detail is that I'm running 4.1.20, according to Suses's yast. But 
> you say the bug was introduced later. 

That's what the bug report I'm working from said.  I have not
personally tested 4.1.20 to see if it is affected by this problem.


> I had found the second of these links, but it didn't seem to match
> my symptoms because (a) the release number doesn't match and (b)
> there's apparently no -follow on the command that was executing on
> my machine. 

It sounds like a different bug then, if it is a bug.

> The other odd thing is that this search runs every night and hasn't
> failed again, whereas the symptoms in that bug report look like a
> 'hard', repeatable failure.

Precisely.  

I think then that you're seeing a different problem.  If it happens
again, could you 

        1. check the state of the process using "ps" (probably
           D, S or R)
        2. get a snapshot of what it's doing with "strace -p" and/or
           "ltrace -p"
        3.  and then kill it with "SIGQUIT"

Raise a bug against findutils on the Savannah bug reporting page
(http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils) and attach

        1. The output of ps, strace, ltrace etc.
        2. the 'find' executable you are using
        3. the resulting core file (assuming you are running
           with "ulimit -c unlimited").

Thanks,
James.