shell escape causes vi to lock up

[Jonathan Shapiro]

[ Is this bug selective, at least? maybe even a VIRTUAL BUG ? ]

	I think I know what happens when your shell escape locks, and I am
going to use this opportunity to resurface my plea yet again, in the
vain hope that someone may yet answer.

	When you run out of VMS processes, VMS hangs waiting for one of
your processes to complete before it gives you the new one.  Suppose now
that you are in vi.  You are now in your third process - one for your login
VMS job, another for your eunice shell, and another vi. you exec a shell
escape - process #4.  If you do something like an ls, that fires up another
process to accomplish the sort, process #5.  basically, there are loads
of processes invisibly hanging around.  Further, after you are done with a
spawned job, eunice hangs onto it for a while so that if you ask for
another
it can reuse it.  The catch? EUNICE doesn't actually seem to do the reuse
part in real life.  The final scenario runs like this:

	vi spawns a job, and lets go of stdin and stdout so that the
		spawned job can have them.
	VMS gets a job request and goes hunting down the process list to
		see how many processes you are running.  It concludes
		that you are at your limit and waits for one of those
		other processes (all of which are actively in use to main-
		tain you where you are) to finish before exec'ing the
		new process.  Until the new process execs, no one has claim
		on the stdin and stdout for your terminal.  All you can do
		is fill the typeahead buffer (if you have one) in
		frustration. NOT EVEN INTERRUPTS GO ANYWHERE - you are hung
		in one of the problem spots between EUNICE and VMS.

	Actually, it is a bit worse than that.  If you examine VMS job
list you will find that at least one of your jobs - the one which is
trying to spawn - is in mwait.  go looking at the manuals and find out,
if you don't know, what mwait means and you will realize that that state
is truly ugly indeed.

	So that is what I suspect has happened to you.

	NOW THE PLEA:

	We are DESPERATELY trying to get netnews and uucp running on our
system.  Would ANYONE who has by hook or by crook managed to do it please
contact me either at sjuvax!jss by e-mail or at Haverford College if they
are willing to help us?  I have gotten many requests from people saying
they don't know how and would like to know how.  If you want help, I am
collecting those requests as soon as I am able to help (if ever).  Come on
folks, enough stuff is going out that someone out there is running EUNICE
on the net.  Please help us out...


Jonathan S. Shapiro
Haverford College
Haverford Pa.  19041

sjuvax!jss