On 05/26/2014 09:13 PM, Azat Khuzhin wrote: > sort already have one when it trying to create decompressor, it is > obvious why it is really required in this case, since sort will read > compressed data as plain otherwise. > But sometimes it is really usefull to know whether sort failed to create > compressor or not, since some users may rely on available free space and > compressor. > > * src/sort.c (create_temp_file): Add a warning when creating of > compressor failed. > --- > There is some old discussion about this > http://osdir.com/ml/bug-coreutils-gnu/2013-07/msg00010.html, but before this > will be fixed(?) we could print a warning on fail at least. > Thanks. > > src/sort.c | 7 +++++++ > 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) > > diff --git a/src/sort.c b/src/sort.c > index 49caae5..eb1b1f3 100644 > --- a/src/sort.c > +++ b/src/sort.c > @@ -1133,6 +1133,13 @@ maybe_create_temp (FILE **pfp, bool > survive_fd_exhaustion) > > async_safe_die (errno, "couldn't execute compress program"); > } > + else > + { > + error (0, errno, > + _("warning: couldn't create process for %s " > + "(try to install overcommit always)"), > + compress_program); > + } > } > > *pfp = fdopen (tempfd, "w");
Thanks for the patch. Note POSIX says that programs shouldn't output to stderr unless they're exiting with a failure code, I guess to avoid gradual accretion of warnings etc. which could impair general usage. So the issue here is that sort is allocating a large buffer up front thus impacting the fork(). Really sort(1) should be trying to avoid this issue in the first place, and the issue is already logged at: http://bugs.gnu.org/14752 thanks, Pádraig.
