On Mon, Jan 10, 2000 at 11:32:40PM -0800, Brian Lavender wrote:
> I have been working on a Cobalt RAQ server and suddenly the thing is on
> the fritz. I am able to ssh into it, but once I get on, bash forks on me
[...]
> [admin admin]$ ls
> bash: fork: Try again
This error message is saying you tried to start a new process (ls)
but there were too many active processes on the system to start a new
one. The user account being used could have too many processes currently
running or the overall system limit could have been reached.
The reason "cd" and "pwd" worked because those commands are built into
the shell... so you don't actually start a new process to run them.
However, most commands aren't built into the shell so they do require a
new process to run.
You can use "ulimit -a" to check on the user's process limit. Don't
remember how to check the system wide limit... but if you
"cd /proc; echo [0-9]*" you should see a LOT processes numbers listed...
Getting some root user to investigate what's running on the system
would be a good idea.
TTFN,
Mike
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