"make check" failure with sort-compress on OSF and Linux

[Paul Eggert]

Matthew Woehlke <address@hidden> writes:

> It does actually fail. In fact, from the mountains of diff output it
> looks like 'sort' *may* be completely failing to output anything, or
> at least failing to output large chunks of what it is supposed to. I
> can re-run with VERBOSE, but it's going to be a *big* log, should I
> bz2 it and post that?

No thanks, please don't bother.  I can reproduce the problem on my
Debian stable host as follows:

cd tests/misc
ulimit -u 64
make check-TESTS TESTS=sort-compress

The exact value "64" depends on how many other processes I have; if I
make it too small the test has unrelated problems, and if I make it
too large the test succeeds.

I'll try to take a look at it when I have more time.