subshell bug?

[Pavel Roskin]

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Joe Koenig wrote:

> I've encountered this behaviour 2 days ago for the first time. When
> starting mc (from xterm/rxvt) it hangs for several (>10) seconds.
>
> My reaserch always pointed to some obcsure subshell handling in mc. And
> I just noticed:
>
>  $ mc > scratch
>    subshell.c: couldn't get terminal settings: Inappropriate ioctl for
>    device

This may be completely unrelated to your problem.  I can reproduce this
message (which is probably correct), but not the 10 seconds delay.

10 seconds probably comes from feed_subshell() in src/subshell.c:

    /* we wait up to 10 seconds if fail_on_error, forever otherwise */
    wtime.tv_sec = 10;
    wtime.tv_usec = 0;

This time out is used the first time a command is sent to the subshell.
The command is sent on startup.  I don't know what subshell you are using
(bash, tcsh or zsh), but you can find the initial commands for all
subshells in init_subshell().

If the subshell doesn't answer before timeout, it's not used.

> IIRC the temporary workaround would be something like
> chmod 666 /dev/tty
> As I'm quite reluctant to do this, I'd like to know fix this.

More information is needed to fix it.  At least I need to know your OS and
subshell versions just to reproduce the problem.  I don't know the
permissions on /dev/tty and whether you are running mc as root.

> BTW, is this the official FAQ
> http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/mc/mc/FAQ
> ?  Cause it's down since 2 days.

Yes, it's down.  I hoped it would return online sooner.  Maybe this
dependency on other site should be avoided.  I'll write a script to upload
FAQ and TODO directly to the website.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin