The real answer here, before I even ask the question, is "use emacs"
but that's not my choice, so on with the question.
A couple of times today a developer's vi session has hung when he
tried to paste some text into it from the X clipboard (this is on
dapper). On examination, the vi process is taking 99% of the CPU and
stracing it, I see that it is repeatedly doing nothing but loads of
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 0}) = 1 (in [0], left {0, 0})
followed by
brk(0xb4ee000) = 0xb4ee000
another armful of
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 0}) = 1 (in [0], left {0, 0})
followed by another
brk(0xb50f000) = 0xb50f000
and so on.
The amount of text pasted was of the order of 5 lines, so why vi
keeps wanting more memory is a puzzle.
Doing an strace on a working vi, doing the same thing, I see that the
select returns 1 and there's then a read to get the pasted data, all
perfectly kosher. So, why in the crashing state does the select keep
returning 1 but this is not being followed by a read? Any ideas?
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be!
