>Well, it's not so uncommon, I had it a few times. Reading on internet >it seems that other users have it but don't notice it.
The fault could be in some other program accessing the terminal. Bash does not clear O_NONBLOCK on displaying a prompt, so if a previously executed program sets O_NONBLOCK on stdin and then exits, that state will remain until some other program unsets it. For example: $ cat >foo.c #include <fcntl.h> int main(void) {fcntl(0, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK); return 0;} ^D $ cc foo.c $ ./a.out $ cat cat: -: Resource temporarily unavailable --Andrew Church http://achurch.org/