Is System V.4 fork reliable?

[Jim Rosenberg]

gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>In article <561 at oglvee.UUCP> jr at oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) writes:
>>(The shell simply reports the bogus message "No more processes".

>Actually, the UNIX System V shells that I've encountered do keep retrying
>the fork() operation for a while.  In fact, somewhere around SVR2.0 the
>shell was changed to use an "exponential backoff" algorithm, i.e. the
>delay between successive retries was doubled each time until some limit
>was hit, at which time the shell would give up with "No more processes".

Fascinating.  I don't think we're seeing this behavior, but all of our
users are either taken straight to our database manager sans shell by
.profile or use csh.  I bet the exponential backoff was *not* put into csh.
This is V.3.1.  I don't know when AT&T officially held its nose and blessed
csh as a "real" shell, but my impression is that it wasn't until V.3.2.

Does csh under V.4 have the exponential backoff?  I presume under BSD no
such thing is needed.
-- 
Jim Rosenberg             #include <disclaimer.h>      --cgh!amanue!oglvee!jr
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