From owner-help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Wed Feb  5 15:28:37 1997
Subject: subprocesses
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: James Walter Taylor <james at halcyon dot com>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 15:27:22 -0600

On  5-Feb-1997, James Walter Taylor <james at halcyon dot com> wrote:

| I'm using octave to drive the testing of a pattern recognition
| program. An octave script generates a pattern, stores it in a 
| file and starts an external process which processes the data.
| 
| i.e. a loop around a construct like:
| 
| ---
| V = blah();
| fdx=fopen(tmpFile, 'w');
| fprintf(fdx, '%d\n', V);
| fclose(fdx);
| 
| [result,s] = system(['/home/james/newthing <' tmpFile ]); 
| 
| ---
| millions of times.  Well after only a few 10s of thousands of times
| I see errors like:
| 
| error: unable to start subprocess for `/home/james/newthing </tmp/7241Data.dat'
| error: evaluating index expression near line 24, column 14
| error: evaluating assignment expression near line 24, column 12
| ... etc.
| 
| And at that point even "ls" produces errors:
| ---
| octave:27> ls
| error: couldn't start process for ls!
| error: evaluating expression near line 27, column 1
| ---

This sounds like a bug.  It might be a bug in Octave, but I can't be
sure.

What version of Octave are you using?  What kind of system are you
using?  What does the external program do?

I took a guess, and tried running

  for i = 1:100000
    fn = tmpnam ();
    fd = fopen (fn, 'w');
    fprintf (fd, '%d\n', i);
    fclose (fd);
    [result, s] = system (['cat ', fn]);
    printf (result);
    fflush (stdout);
    unlink (fn);
  endfor

but it seems to work correctly.


Please send bug reports to bug-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu, and please
include enough information so that I might be able to fix the
problem.  The Bugs chapter in the Octave manual has a list of items
that should be in every bug report, and includes tips for writing bug
reports that will help to ensure that the bug is actually fixed.

Thanks,

jwe